Chapter 10 Vanishing Point
Heaven
Castiel paced across the smooth marble floor, glancing every now and then at the slumped form of the archangel on the low dais.
"I cannot believe it, Castiel," Michael said quietly and Cas turned to him, his face tightening.
"Believe it. Raphael has been in this from the beginning." He looked down absently at the vessel he wore. The suit and trenchcoat were completely out of place in this hall, but he couldn't just leave the vessel down there as he came and went. And, he admitted a little reluctantly to himself, he liked the body. It gave very little trouble overall.
"Meddling with the lines – trafficking with the hellspawn – breaking the seals –" Michael said, his voice raw.
"Killing angels," Cas added. "Consorting with the fallen. Inciting rebellion. Treason. Disobedience."
Michael's gaze snapped up to the seraphim's face. "It will be war."
Castiel nodded tiredly. "I know."
"We have no proof," Michael said, his wings lifting restlessly behind him.
"Absence of proof is not proof of innocence, my Lord," Castiel reminded him. "It was Raphael's suggestion to imprison the Scribe, when he learned of the tablets. It was Raphael's order that the cherubim followed when they united the Winchester and Campbell lines, specifically the bloodlines of Araquiel and Azazel. It was Raphael's command that Azazel begin his work in Kansas."
"And Uriel," Michael said, getting to his feet.
"Uriel has gone beyond punishment or redemption, Michael."
The archangel sighed as he stepped off the dais. "How many followers does Raphael have?"
Cas shook his head. "At a rough guess? Perhaps seven or eight thousand."
"What does he want with the Grigori?"
"The Angel tablet, I believe," Cas said.
Michael's eyes narrowed at him. "That has been lost for centuries."
"No."
"You know its location?" Michael raised a brow at the seraphim, wondering at his certainty.
"No," Cas said. "Only the region. The scholars believe that the angels and the nephilim of the Grigori fought a battle in the desert. All traces of that battle were wiped clean by a sandstorm lasting three months. At the site of that battle, the hiding place of the Angel tablet."
"Have we verified that?" Michael frowned.
"Yes, to some extent. It is in our records. There was a battle, between nephilim and angel – not the Host," Cas said. "The battalion was under Uriel's command. The original orders were destroyed."
"I don't understand," Michael said slowly, looking at him. "What possible use could the tablet have been to Raphael?"
"Only one knows what the Word contained, my Lord," Castiel said carefully. "But it seems possible along with the instructions for closing the gates of Heaven, there may be other things on the tablet – devices or spells or ways of … disabling us, if humanity needed them."
"You think Raphael wants to somehow – what? Take away the power of the Host so that his followers will have victory?"
Cas sighed. "It's what I would do in his position."
"You have spent entirely too much time on the lower plane."
"Undoubtedly," Cas agreed. "Raphael was the last angel to see Metatron in Heaven, Michael. The Scribe fled following that meeting. A simple study of cause and effect–"
"Yes, I see your point," Michael cut him off. "We have been searching for Metatron for three thousand years. We are not going to find him now."
"It seems unlikely."
"And these meetings, with the Grigori," Michael asked, turning to watch the seraphim as he resumed his pacing. "They were all on the lower plane?"
"Yes," Cas said, his speed increasing slightly. "Raphael has been to see all three groups. We believe that he has also been meeting with the new ruler of Hell."
"Upstart," Michael sniffed disdainfully. "Did we discover what happened to the remaining Fallen?"
Cas shook his head. "Nothing we've tried so far has been able to reveal their situation. If they are still alive, they're deep in the lower levels, beyond our capabilities to see or sense."
"Who do you trust?" The archangel looked at him.
"No one."
January 20, 2013. West Keep, Lebanon
Firelight flickered against the white, plastered walls and Dean looked up from the pages he was reading as he registered the cooling of the room. Putting the sheaf of papers on the table, he got up and walked to the hearth, stirring the embers and throwing another couple of logs onto the coals.
On the sofa, Alex was sleeping, her fingers still holding a couple of pages loosely. He gently pulled them free and pulled the thick, hand-woven blanket from the back of the sofa over her. They'd been reading and analysing Chuck's latest 'chapters' for hours, trying to find more clues in the narratives.
There was nothing about the army in the latest vision and he wasn't sure how to take that. Did it mean that their trip to New Mexico had been successful and had stopped the Grigori from being able to go down that road? Somehow, he doubted it. It might've derailed the timetable, but as long as Chuck was here, the plan would remain in place. If they had the tablet, they needed the prophet to read it.
That was bugging the crap out of him as well. Moving Chuck might save the keeps and the population. The problem was he couldn't think of anywhere that was safer than where the writer was now. Even angel-and-demon-proofed, there was nowhere more defensible than the order's safehold. And the narrative had implied that the Grigori were looking for leverage anyway. It might not save the people here if the army arrived and the prophet was gone. It might make an attack that much worse.
Walking to the kitchen, he emptied the cold grounds in the coffee pot and refilled it absently, his thoughts circling around the account Chuck had written out. In it, again, he and Sam were … somewhere else. There wasn't enough detail to figure out why or where. Woods. An old boneyard with no details as to where it might be. A gateway to Hell, in the centre of it.
He returned to the chair, picking up the last few pages and carrying them to the small kitchen table, his gaze skimming over the text until he found the description.
'The air shimmered, as if the dim light caught something there, but when Dean turned to look at it directly that shimmer disappeared and he could see nothing beyond the ordinary, leaning tombstones and brown, dried grasses, stiff with frost. As a light breeze blew between the leafless trees and dying undergrowth, the hunter caught the scent of sulphur, not consistently, but in tantalising wafts, here and then gone, as if the doorway was opening and closing, letting out the stench of the other plane in snatches.'
What the fuck did that mean, Dean wondered? From the description, the gate was in the middle of a tiny clearing in the cemetery, hanging mid-air. It couldn't be seen directly but only from the corner of the eye. And was it open? Or was it opening and closing on its own?
The pot burbled softly to itself and he put the pages on the table, getting a cup from the cupboard and filling it, carrying both coffee and papers back to the armchair and sitting down again.
There was something familiar in the description but he couldn't nail it, couldn't retrieve either the sense of why it was familiar, or any memory that matched up with the location.
When they'd gotten back from Taos, he and Sam had gone straight to the order on Bobby's request. The spell keyed from the scribe of God's sigil had returned seven locations, around the world, and Mitch had used the sigil as the marker on the war table in the situation room, each location glowing a bright blue. One was in the desert, between Jordan and Iraq. Both Jerome and Jasper believed that to be the site of an underground city of the dead, Gem Shel Yed'e, and the most likely location for the Angel tablet. Three were in the US – in Montana, Florida and Massachusetts. There had been, apparently, a lot of arguments about the Massachusetts location, the spell had not given the location definitively, the flames moving around the area instead of remaining steady. He wasn't sure what to make of that, since none of those who'd seen it were describing it in exactly the same way either, as if they'd all seen the flames from a slightly different perspective.
The fifth location was in Egypt, and all three professors had agreed that was most likely the resting place of the Ten Commandments. He shook his head slightly, the corner of his mouth lifting with the association of a well-known and well-liked action film.
The sixth was in the arctic, north of the sixtieth meridian and as inaccessible to them as anything could possibly be. The seventh appeared to be in the order's chapter in Australia, possibly now buried under tons of rock.
The order had acquired the most detailed survey and topographical maps of the country in digital form before Lucifer had risen, and from the locations provided by the spell, both the Florida and Montana sites seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. The Massachusetts site, however much it'd moved around, was in Boston. He thought that was significant, although he wasn't sure how.
Anchoring the papers with his cup, he rubbed a hand tiredly over his face, ignoring the prick of two-day stubble against his fingers. There were too many fucking variables here, and not enough information, he thought irritably. They were hunting for clues in visions and spells, and the sense of things converging around them, converging on top of them, was getting stronger in the back of his mind. The uneasiness at the vision's insistence that he and Sam weren't here when the army attacked was growing as well. There was no fucking way he was going to be anywhere but here. He couldn't think of a single valid reason why he wouldn't be, knowing what they knew.
Felix had suggested that the movement of the Mass location was because the tablet was no longer on this plane. It made as much as sense as anything else. It also made getting the damned thing a lot harder, he thought sourly. There were ways into Hell, Jerome said. Ways to open the gates. But legend insisted that the gates were guarded. And they didn't know where they were.
Not true, he remembered suddenly. He knew for certain where one gate had been. Jim's journal had given the location of the gate in Pasadena. Of course, as of a year ago, Pasadena was somewhere under half a mile of water, the earthquakes that had riven California finally stressing the fault enough that a sizeable chunk of the state had collapsed into the ocean. It wasn't helpful.
He picked up the cup and his sleeve brushed against the papers, knocking the pile to the floor. Putting the cup down, he leaned over and gathered them up, flicking through them to put them back into order. He stopped as he saw the glossy printout in the middle, the grainy black and white image leaping out at him and catching at the breath in his throat.
Alex had handed it to him earlier and he glanced at it, more focussed on the prophet's visions, the spell's results and the bitter, underlying taste of Maggie's loss to pay attention to it then. She'd said that Kim had been checking the pregnancies over the last week and a half. Eighty percent, perhaps higher by now, multiple births. Humanity repopulating the globe in triple time.
And two, these two, were his.
Feeling surged through him, an overwhelming tumult, holding him fiercely in its grip as he glanced across at the face of the woman lying on the sofa and back to the printout he held. This was exactly why he couldn't believe in the visions, he thought. He'd die before he put them at risk.
Dragging in a deep breath and waiting for the churning eddies of his feelings to settle, he slid the printout under the pile. When he'd told Lisa, in Cicero, that it wasn't his life, he'd known he'd wanted it. Wanted it more than he could admit to, more than he could face. It'd taken every ounce of self-control he'd had to walk away from that invitation. It hadn't been right, he knew, not then and with her, not even later. But he'd wanted the promise of it. It'd taken him a long time to bury that knowledge, bury it deep and not look at it again. Everything that'd happened since then had proved to him that he'd been right to do that, right to feel that it wasn't for him, couldn't be his.
He still wasn't completely sure that he was doing the right thing. Not completely sure that with all that he'd done, he would be allowed to have it. Not certain that he wasn't putting Alex in harm's way again. For whatever reasons, he thought, an edge of bitterness trailing along the thought, he was still in the middle of everything. And everyone around him was at risk of being drawn into the schemes he could feel building around him and his brother. But the truth was he couldn't – he didn't want to – let go of her now. No matter what the risks were.
Getting to his feet, he walked to the sofa, pushing the blanket back and sliding his arms under her shoulders and knees, straightening his legs as he took her weight and lifted. He carried her to the bedroom and put her on the bed, sitting down on the edge to take off his boots.
"What time is it?" Alex asked sleepily from behind him.
"Late," he told her, turning around and seeing her watching him through half-open eyes. "Go back to sleep."
She shook her head, sitting up and tucking her head in as she drew off her sweater and shirt. Dean stood, unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his jeans, letting them fall to the floor as he pulled off his shirt, heat already coruscating along his nerves as he watched her undress in front of him.
This is yours, he told himself a few minutes later, as his mouth trailed lightly down her heated skin, tasting her unobtrusively. No one can take this away.
From the moment he woke in the mornings, hearing the soft whisper of breath beside him, to the moment he closed his eyes at night, the weight and worry gone in the warmth of her arms around him, it was a potent reminder that he wasn't fighting on his own, a real and tangible reminder that he had something to live for, to fight for, that wasn't an abstract of the many and the few and the sacrifices made by good men.
Her fingers trembled down his side and his breath whistled as he sucked it in through his teeth, muscle twitching and jumping with the sharp pleasure that followed them under and over his skin. It was never the same, instinct overriding technique and satiation a distant and unlooked-at goal, the path toward it meandering and fully explored, never hurried, always lingering in the flush of senses fully aware and the craving for a deeper connection, a deeper joining.
He still had no control. No ability to hold anything back. No desire to do so either, but even if he'd wanted to, he couldn't. Couldn't find distance or breath. Couldn't deny himself or her. Couldn't hold on and couldn't let go, every taste and touch, every sensation that crackled in lightning bolts along his nerves and inundated his brain, dictating that he accept and immerse himself, without thought or volition. And that abandon, that complete lack of control, of mind, of thought, reached right through him, amplifying everything, liquefying everything, drowning him and saving him and dissolving him.
Holding his weight above her on his arms, the big muscles trembling with the effort, he blinked rapidly, trying to get the spots and sparkles and black edges that had filled his vision clear again. Under him, Alex was panting quietly, lips parted and eyes half-closed, pupils enormous. The wide bed smelled of musk and clean sweat, the scents of their bodies mingled. This is mine, he thought incoherently, not sure of what he meant.
Taos, New Mexico
More than half of the long building was blackened and crumbling, Crowley thought, looking at the stark, skeletal remains. Turning, he saw the burned out frames of the vehicles, surrounded by metal sheets that had been twisted into spirals by the ferocious heat. Three men and two woman, he thought. Two of them had been the Winchesters, of course, and he probably should've warned the Grigori about the chequered history of those two, although he hadn't really believed the stories up till now, but still … five humans.
"We will hunt them down," Baeder's voice came croakily from beside him.
Crowley turned back to the two angels and looked at him expressionlessly. "In the state you're in now?" He shook his head. "No, we'll take them, make no mistake about that, but we'll do it my way, with an army and some leverage."
Baeder glowered at him from his remaining greyish-blue eye. The angels would heal, they always did, Crowley thought. But it would be a slow process and where the holy oil had touched them, he thought it would not heal up. Half of the angel's face was melted, the missing eye had been incinerated in its socket, and the shiny, brilliant red skin was still weeping here and there, clear liquid escaping as the swelling slowly receded. The scars would stay.
He knew that was what offended both men the most. Not the death of their peers, and he suspected, Baeder's paramour, but the fact that they were no longer beautiful. Were now, in fact, showing more of what had lain on the inside on their outsides. God's somewhat nasty sense of humour, the demon thought derisively.
"Where are the others?" he asked, feeling an impatience to be gone from here.
Dietrich turned and looked in the direction of the barn and two women, four men and two children came out across the crisp, recent fall of powder. Two of the nephilim had been burned as well, Crowley saw. The others seemed alright. He kept his face impassive as he noticed Draxler's hands, both swollen and misshapen under soft bandages.
"Walking wounded," he commented lightly. "Come on, what I've got to show will improve your spirits, I dare say."
He spread his arms as they gathered close to him and the air rushed in to fill where they'd been as they disappeared, leaving the dank smell of wet, burned wood and charred stone to fill the small valley in peace.
35º41'01.73N 54º39'33.07W, Atlantic Ocean
The yacht was moving fast, heeled over on her side, the water bubbling and frothing as she cut through the waves, the force of her keel against the water holding her course against the opposing force of the wind on the sails. Peter drew in a deep breath of the ridiculously fresh, salt-laden air and smiled unconsciously. Until they reached land again, there was nothing to think about, nothing to worry about except their course and the state of his boat. It was a period of rest that he was enjoying immensely.
The trade winds blew steadily against them, the boat close-hauled and making good speed. Over the thousands of miles of ocean fetch, the waves were regular, long and widely spaced, their crests furling in small explosions of white foam and sliding behind them without more than a gentle dip and sigh.
He looked down at the companionway as Elena climbed into the cockpit, her short hair shining in the bright sunlight, eyes crinkling a little as she smiled back at him.
"We are making good time," she said, less of a question than a statement.
He nodded. "Averaging a hundred and thirty miles a day. We'll reach the edge of the banks in a day."
"It went too quickly."
Inclining his head in acknowledgement, he glanced down at the dark cabin below. "The Qaddiysh are resting?"
"No, they are arguing," she told him, her tone slightly acerbic. "They would disagree –"
She cut herself off as Peter's gaze went back to the hatch and Penemue climbed out, moving to the higher side of the cockpit and drawing in a deep breath, the frown creasing his forehead smoothing out as he looked around.
"Have you come to an agreement?" Elena asked him.
The Irin turned to look at her and shrugged. "Of a sort. Perhaps. We will go to Kansas, talk to the hunters about re-imprisoning the goddesses."
"Good," she said, her teeth closing with a faint snap.
He smiled at her. "We still think the tablets are more important, Elena," he said. "As well hidden as they are, they can still be found – and if their use is understood ..." he trailed away, looking back over the endless procession of waves.
"What?" Peter asked curiously.
"When he completed the Word and delivered the tablets to us, the Scribe told us that Heaven would seek it out."
"Why?" Elena frowned at him. "It is to protect humanity, is it not?"
Penemue sighed. "Each tablet, on its own and of itself, holds great power. There are secrets written into them, secrets to control the forces that were set in place to help humanity evolve. Weapons. Spells. Instructions on how to neutralise those forces, and to lock them up."
Peter nodded impatiently. "Yes, we know this."
"Each tablet – within its text there is more, revealed only to the prophet who may study them. Metatron said that we had to protect the tablets from everyone, because the power of God's Word could also be accessed from them."
The hunters glanced at each other, and Peter turned back to Penemue. "The actual power of God is held in the tablets? That it can be accessed and used?"
The Irin nodded slowly. "It is better than that," he added, his eyes narrowing as he looked west. "When all the tablets are brought together, that power is magnified."
Peter looked at him, feeling the blood in his veins turn to ice. "That is why Raphael is rebelling? To regain that power so that he can wield it?"
"We think so."
"Can the tablets be destroyed?" Elena asked, her skin crawling with the thought of anyone – angel, demon or human – with that sort of power.
"No," Penemue said heavily. "Not by anything we know of. They can be used, to close and lock the other planes. To protect humanity against the forces of Hell or Heaven or the Mother's children. But as with the box we brought with us, that power is always going to be double-edged. They must be hidden away. They must be impossible to find."
Elena braced herself in the hatchway, the sextant held against her eye as her fingers slowly lowered the mirror to bring the limb to the horizon.
"Merde!"
Peter looked at her as she shifted her position against the doghouse ledge and tried again. She'd been getting slightly more impatient, he'd noticed, over the last few days, a little quicker to snap at the four men, a fraction more likely to get flustered. He wondered if it was just the necessary close quarters of the small yacht.
She swayed with the boat's movements, the sextant raised again.
"Fils de putain!"
For a moment he thought she might throw the instrument overboard and he looked away quickly. He heard the exaggeratedly deep breath she took and risked another glance. She was once again peering through the lens to the mirror, her fingers delicate on the screw. This time she looked at the measurement and at her watch, memorising both, and went below.
Peter waited until she came up again.
"We didn't need the extra sight," he remarked blandly.
"We are still at least four days out from Rhode Island," she said shortly. "And the current will be against us when we get close."
"And then we will have a long walk to Kansas," Peter said, shrugging slightly. "Elena, is there anything wrong?"
She looked away. "No, I'm fine."
He withheld his opinion on that, letting the silence stretch out between them.
"Non, you are right," she burst out a few minutes later, thin shoulders hunching up defensively. "I am not fine."
"What's wrong?"
"Je me sens incroyablement sexuel!" she said, her skin flushing a pale pink from her collarbones to her hairline as she looked at the taut sail above them. "It is – a part – never mind!"
"Elena –"
She was on deck and moving fast up toward the foredeck before he could finish, hands gripping the wire rail and rigging as she went.
Baraquiel emerged from the cabin and looked from Peter to Elena.
"What is going on?" Peter asked him in bewilderment.
"You have no children, Peter?"
He stared at the Irin, more baffled. "No."
The red-haired angel smiled, a little ruefully. "For some women, at a certain point in the pregnancy, there is an increase in libido," he explained, gesturing discreetly toward the bow of the boat. "I suspect that Elena is one of those women. The hormones, the changes, they all make it worse, emotionally as well as physically."
Peter frowned at him and looked at the hunched figure sitting on the winch near the bows. "She's feeling … uh … frustrated?"
"Indeed," Baraquiel said. "Look at her situation. How much more frustrating could it be?"
Litteris Hominae, Lebanon
The situation room was crowded, the scholars and hunters surrounding the underlit table. Ellen looked along the length of it, listening to the crossed conversations that were flowing back and forth, her gaze flicking from time to time to Dean, who stood at one end, staring down at the blue locations with brows drawn together.
"We can't know that the irregularity of the spells means that the tablet is located in another dimension," Maurice said to Jasper patiently. "Jerome said it himself, the spells aren't that infallible."
"We know that the Angel tablet, that is certainly not on any other plane, showed a stable response. As did the others," Jasper argued. "Except for the one in Massachusetts. That is a solid indicator that the spells worked fine!"
"Alright, enough, everybody," Bobby growled, glaring around the table. "We got too many cooks in here, and we need to cut through this crap and get down to what we can do."
Jerome nodded sharply. "Aaron, we need supporting lore for the other tablets. Marla, Oliver, if that is indeed the location of the demon tablet, I want everything on opening the gates sorted and ready to use," he snapped. The three researchers left the table and Jerome looked at Katherine and Davis. "The information Michel sent on the location of Ninhursag and Nintu still requires verification and the correct lore on using Pandora's box when the Qaddiysh get here with it."
The archaeologist and language specialist looked at each other and shrugged, turning away and returning to the library.
Sam looked around the table, shifting slightly in the newly available space. Dean was still staring down at the map. Maurice, Rufus, Ellen and Bobby were watching him. On the other side, Chuck, Felix, Jasper and Jerome also looked expectantly at the de facto leader of the free population.
"It's still sixteen hundred miles to Boston," Dean said, looking up into the silence. "And in good weather, with good roads, that'd take a day to drive." He shrugged slightly. "With the snowfall we've got, and god-knows-what kind of roads, that could take weeks," he continued. And he wasn't going anywhere that would take weeks, he added to himself. Not now.
"If it's not on this plane, it wouldn't help anyway," Sam said, looking at the older hunters. "We still need a gate. And a way to get through it."
"We can summon a psychopomp," Jerome said reluctantly. "They can guide the dead – or the living – to any of the planes –"
"For a price," Felix interjected. "And there's no telling what that price will be."
Jerome nodded. "There are a number of spells that can be used as well. But the lore on the gates agrees on one thing –"
"Cerberus," Bobby said caustically, having done his own research on the gates in the last two weeks. "Every account says the hellhound guards the gates and there's no way of getting past it."
"A hellhound?" Maurice looked at Bobby. "I thought there were dozens."
"Not a hellhound," Ellen explained. "The Hellhound." She'd read her own share of the lore and the descriptions of the creature had given her nightmares for several days. "Cerberus is a giant two or three-headed dog that guards every gate and kills and devours anyone who tries to get in without permission."
"How do the psychopomps get around that?" Sam asked her.
Bobby looked at him. "No idea. Backdoors? Secret tunnels? Who knows? It's not the only problem though. Hell changes form according to how you enter."
"What do you mean?" Dean looked at him.
"A soul going in sees whatever it's most afraid of," Bobby said, his gaze cutting away from the younger man as he noticed Dean's jaw tightening. "Cas said that when the angels went in to get you out, they were in what he called 'constructs' – flesh and blood but not mortal and the layout stayed fixed for them. But the mythology says that a mortal going into Hell sees a maze, a labyrinth that can change direction, shift levels, become visible or invisible. Mortals can't really see the souls that are in there, or the demons that aren't wearing meatsuits. And the demons can't really see the mortals because the junction between the two planes isn't a stable one, it fluctuates along the join."
"That's a good thing, though, right?" Dean frowned at him, pushing back at the memories of what he'd seen. It would all be useless to him if it didn't match up with what he would see as flesh and blood. "Not being seen?"
"Not necessarily," Ellen said, remembering the section of the book that Bobby was referring to. "It makes it easy to get lost in there, lost so bad you might never find a way out."
"That's reassuring."
"Just one of the problems," Bobby said, shaking his head. "You get in there, it's a different plane but it's an infinite one. There are meeting places where it joins this plane or some other one, but not that many. How do you find one tablet in there?"
"Actually," Felix said, leaning on the table. "That's not such a problem. There is an account in our records of a mortal who went into Hell and came out again – it was an attempt to retrieve an artefact, in fact."
"Where is it?" Bobby asked, pushing back his cap irritably. He thought he'd gotten all the references to the ways in and out of Hell.
"It's cross-referenced with the artefact – one of the golden apples of Hesperides." He gestured at the library behind them. "I'll pull it out for you."
"We still have the problem of protecting Chuck," Rufus interrupted. "Even if you discouraged them, you know they're going to keep coming," he said to Dean.
"Franklin's sending over six of his," Sam said. "Just to add another layer of protection here."
"'Here' isn't the danger," Ellen said. "It's the keeps that'll take the brunt of any attack. Demons may not be able to cross over, and we're angel-proofing everything now, but there's no lore on protection against the half-breeds, and if they can just walk in with bombs, we're going to lose a lot of people for nothing."
Dean looked at her steadily. "Even if we moved Chuck and kept moving, they'd still come here, Ellen. You know that." He flicked a glance at Bobby, seeing the old man's agreement in his eyes. "They'll use everyone here as leverage to get us to hand Chuck over no matter where we are."
Sam saw Chuck swallow uncomfortably, the prophet's gaze fixed on the table surface and his knuckles whitening along the edge.
"There's only one way we're going to be able to stop them – that's getting the tablet first and hoping there's a helluva more info on it than we know about." Dean looked at the faces staring at him, waiting for a disagreement. No one spoke.
"We need the locations of a gate. We need to know if the location matters or if once we're in, we can find whatever we need to in there. We need to know a way to distract or trick the hellhound so that we can get past it," he continued, his voice deeper than usual, and flint-hard. "We need to know how to move around in there and how to get out. And we need to know all those things as soon as possible." He looked at his brother. "We've got another month, maybe six weeks, before the weather gets better and those bastards are on the road, heading for us. So we don't have the luxury of arguing about what we can't do."
Alex rubbed her eyes and looked down at the notes Chuck had given her.
"Chuck said that he didn't include this because it didn't fit into the vision – he said it was a flash and gone," Father Emilio said, leaning toward her and picking up a page of handwritten notes.
She read through it, frowning at the disjointedness of the images.
Brimstone. Red. Pulsing. Darkness. Screams and a wailing that reached into his mind. The stairs were stone. People everywhere, embedded in the rock, sinking into lava pits and the demons, flickering past, almost but not quite seen, not quite invisible, the awful light catching parts of them.
"Who is this about?" she asked, looking from Father Emilio to Father McConnaughey, who sat on the other side of the table, his back to the fire.
"We don't know," Father McConnaughey said with a shrug. "Chuck wasn't even sure if this belonged to the last vision."
"But it's Hell, right?" She looked back at the paper. "Is there more?"
"From the first vision," Father Emilio confirmed, lifting the handwritten sheets and skimming through them. "Here."
The dog was suspicious. He felt his heart stop as it seemed to look straight at him, stuttering back to life as the reddish eyes moved past without recognition. The tablet lay on the wide, polished ebony desk. For a moment, he could see the man, the soul, looking out of the rock face as if through a window. Blood, spilling onto the ground.
"And this was the same – a glimpse of something that he couldn't relate to the rest?"
Father McConnaughey nodded. "He said that these … fragments … overlaid the more linear visions in bursts. He remembers them, but he doesn't know where they fit, what they mean or even who they're referring so he left them out."
"Is this why you think it's Sam?"
The priests glanced at each other. "We do not know who it is that enters Hell, Alex, whether it is to find the tablet or to close the gates," Father Emilio said quietly. "But Chuck's vision has always centred around the Winchesters. And he writes most from Dean's viewpoint."
That was true, she thought. Not so much in the earlier novels, but certainly in the later ones. He'd told her it was because there was too much going on with Sam that he didn't understand.
"This also was a glimpse from the last vision," Father McConnaughey said, retrieving another note from the pile and handing it to her. She focussed on the increasingly ragged handwriting.
Sam stepped forward and handed the stone to the writer. As his hands touched it, there was a flaring light, filling his mind, blinding him. Then there was nothing.
The next paragraph was more disturbing.
He wasn't human any longer. Nothing but a shell, a conduit, a pipeline to a power he couldn't hope to understand, couldn't dream of envisioning. He was empty and the power poured through him and took everything.
"I think Chuck is more afraid of the tablet than he is of the demon army he knows is coming for him," Father McConnaughey said, looking at the paper she held.
"Can I take these? Dean needs to see them," Alex said, gathering the sheets together.
"Of course, that was why we showed them to you."
"You could've given him these when you spoke to him before," she said, keeping the rebuke in her tone to a minimum.
"Chuck does not know where these pieces fit in," Father Emilio said. "And neither do we. If they refer to entering Hell to retrieve the tablet, that's one thing. But it's possible there's another reason for them, since they did not appear in the narrative form that the vision usually takes."
"And he hasn't seen either man alone, as the protagonist appears to be in these notes," Father McConnaughey added. "Why would Sam or Dean search for the tablet alone?"
Alex ducked her head, looking down at the papers she held to hide her expression. Dean would go alone if he thought it would protect his brother, she thought. She didn't know if Sam would do the same thing.
Camp Atterbury, Indiana
Eric Baeder looked out across the cracked concrete of the parade ground, his eye following the movement of the troops as they marched across the ice-coated surface, his smile confined to the side of his face that still had movement.
The demon, Crowley, had found almost two thousand survivors. He hadn't divulged how. It didn't matter. Every one of them was being controlled by a demon and they were trained in the use of the weapons that the base had held in abundance. When the roads had cleared, it would be a matter of days to get to Kansas.
The skin stretched reluctantly and with pain as he clenched his fist around the polished silver head of the walking stick he needed now. They would pay. They would pay in pain that would surpass anything they'd ever considered, he thought with a savage satisfaction.
"You look … happy," Dietrich said, walking up to him.
Baeder turned his head slowly. The muscle and tendons had been almost burned away in his neck, revealing the shape of his windpipe and the bones of his spine, and he could not move his head fast in any direction.
"Is Draxler back?" he asked, his voice cracked and hoarse.
Dietrich nodded. The oil from the bomb had spared his face. He was bald now, and always would be, and most of one ear was gone, but he still had expression and movement.
"He took two of the farm-workers, and another one from the affiliated camp in Michigan," he said. "No one who would be missed too quickly."
"Have they talked?"
It'd been Dietrich's idea. Jesse and Alison could move around the country – around the world and between the planes, for that matter – at will. Draxler had gone with them. They needed information about the hunters, the men in particular. Most small communities knew a great deal about their leaders, even if they did not know them personally.
"One has," Dietrich answered. "We have a list of names of those who will provide the best leverage. They are all in Kansas."
"And the others?"
"One died immediately," Dietrich said with an indifferent shrug. "The other doesn't seem to know much."
"Dispose of the bodies thoroughly."
"Yes."
"Who do we send in?" Baeder looked back at the broad concrete expanse between the Officer's Mess and the barracks.
"Ariana and Joaquin were the only ones not injured," Dietrich said. "Their colouring is right. They will be believed."
"And the cambion?"
"Once the children are in place, they have the pendants. They can call to them."
"I want to level their buildings, Dietrich. I want to burn them to the ground, and kill every living thing there," Baeder spat, the bitter fury shaking his frame, making the stick rattle against the ground.
Dietrich looked at him. That fury had been there since Draxler had pulled them from the burning building. He'd thought it might diminish, might ease with time but it wasn't. If anything, it was becoming more of an obsession with the fallen angel.
"We need humans, Eric," he said, his voice quiet, but firm. "Killing a population of that size would be … wasteful."
For a moment, he thought Baeder would lift the stick and take a swing at him, the rage-driven tremble through his body becoming more pronounced. Then he saw him control it, drag in a deep breath and push it back and down.
"You are right," Eric acknowledged after a moment. "Their lives in our hands will be significantly more painful than a moment's dying anyway."
Dietrich didn't respond. He turned away and walked back to the building behind them. Baeder was going to become an impediment to the plans they'd conceived with the others, he could see. It was a shame, but there was no getting around it. For the moment, he was still functioning and still useful. When they had retrieved the prophet and returned to Utah, however … he would let Draxler do it, he thought. It would please the cambion.
From the windows of the lavish office overlooking the parade ground, Crowley watched the two fallen as they conversed. The balance of power between them had shifted, he thought, Baeder's irrational anger overtaking him more and more. He wondered if Dietrich would take action to keep his brother under control or if would be left up to him to see that nothing got in the way of the fruition of their plans. Even fallen angels had power and if he did have to do something about Baeder, he would have to make sure that none of the others got bent out of shape as well.
Turning from the view, he walked back to the obscenely comfortable chair behind the desk and sat down. There had always been hunters in the world. As long as there had been things to hunt, at any rate. There was something different about the two Winchesters though, he considered carefully. It couldn't have been coincidence that they were the vessels for Michael and Lucifer. Nor could it have been coincidence that despite all the devil's planning, he'd fallen to them in the end.
"Alicia!"
The door opened, framing a tall, slender blonde woman who looked enquiringly at him.
"I need everything you can find on the Winchesters. History, rumours, likes, dislikes, the brand of toothpaste they use – everything," he snapped at her.
"Of course, sir." She started to back out, and he held up a hand.
"Start with the demons who were training under Alastair," he said. "One of them was in the pit for a while. Someone will have information about that."
She nodded and drew the door closed behind her and Crowley leaned back in the chair, elbows resting on the arms, fingers steepled beneath his chin. Always know your enemy, he thought to himself. He didn't, personally, believe in coincidence.
West Keep, Lebanon
"Wh-what's going on?" Dean asked, a little breathlessly, the last word drowned out by the soft groan that was forced out as his back arched up convulsively.
Alex lifted her head. "You don't want to?"
He gave a strangled laugh, unable to take in a deep breath through the sensations corkscrewing through him. "No, god, no, just … why?"
She didn't answer and he lost interest in the question as she moved her thigh over him, white velvet heat slipping down and enclosing him, thought disappearing altogether as his hips jerked under her and he was everted in expanding pulses of soft pressure, surges of pleasure pulled through him, each one reaching deeper in a quickening spiral.
'Kim said it's normal," Alex said, a half hour later, picking up the conversation when the aftershocks had stopped trembling the bed.
Dean was on his back, eyes closed, his body empty and loose and incapable of movement. He couldn't think what she was talking about.
"Normal?"
"For this stage," Alex clarified a little more, looking over at the faint frown that was drawing his brows together. "In some women. Being easily aroused and having stronger reactions – stronger orgasms," she added, smiling at his expression.
He realised that she was answering his earlier question. "Oh."
The smile was unconscious and he wasn't aware of it until he heard her snort and opened an eye to look at her. "What?"
"Stop smirking," she told him, her thigh slipping over his, and her hand wandering down his side. "You have to hold your end up."
The smirk widened as he closed his eye and stretched out under her touch. "Not a problem."
"Famous last words," she said, feeling a throb deep inside at the smug self-confidence in his voice.
Dean rolled over, feeling the creak and ache of well-used muscles and tendons in his body, pressing his lips against her bare shoulder as he eased himself out of the bed without disturbing her. She hadn't been kidding, he thought as he padded barefoot through the dark rooms to the bathroom, he might well die from another session like that. Not that it would be a bad way to go.
The association came whole and bright and he froze in place as the memory returned, the last few drops plinking into the bowl unnoticed as he saw again the empty cemetery, heavy headstones settling into the earth, unkempt with overlong grass and weeds. They'd been hunting a ghoul. In Pennsylvania. In Clarksburg, Pennsylvania.
The headstone had made him laugh, the connotation that the guy buried there had died in the middle of sex. Sam had given him his patented Sam scowl. Chuck had included the a part of the inscription in his story, not enough to give him the memory, just enough to feel the familiarity of it. He shook off absently and hurried out to the living room, a shiver zipping up his spine as he flipped on the lamp by the table and searched through Chuck's notes and typewritten pages.
His fingers curled around the page he wanted and he read it again. With the memory, the layout of the cemetery became clear. He knew where the gate was.
Was it enough, he wondered? Walking to the armchair, he sat down, looking at the handwritten notes Alex had brought back from the order. One of them had gone in alone. The dog hadn't seen whoever it was …
The medallion, he thought irritably. Of course it would hide him from Cerberus' attention, long enough to slip past and get through. He wouldn't even need a guide or a spell, he thought. In the vision the gate had been open – or open and closing – on its own. He just needed …
Time. He couldn't drive to Pennsylvania. Even in the susvee it would take days and he couldn't leave here for that long.
He got up abruptly, shuffling the papers together and returning them to the table, walking fast to the bedroom. The medallion was in the drawer of the nightstand and he pulled it out quietly as he dragged his jeans on one-handed, tucking it into the pocket. T-shirt, long-sleeved button-through plaid … not the leather jacket … not for Hell. He reached for the Army coat and yanked it on, sitting on the edge of the bed cautiously to pull on socks and his boots. His gear bag was in the hall, he thought. Just the knife, flask and gun. Easing the front door closed behind him, he ghosted down the hall toward the stairs, taking the flight up.
The top platform of the keep was empty and chilled, frozen snow packed into the corners and glittering dully in the faint light. Pulling the jacket closer around him, Dean looked up at the overcast sky, and closed his eyes.
"Cas? Need some help, man," he said, his voice low but clear, brows drawn together as he concentrated on visualising the angel. "Pretty sure I can get the demon tablet, if you can get me to the gate."
The flutter of wings was muted in the open air, and he opened his eyes to see the angel standing in front of him.
"Which gate?" Castiel asked shortly, reaching out to grip Dean's shoulder.
Newport, Rhode Island
The sky to the west was streaked in fading lines of red and salmon and lemon, a deepening indigo reaching out from behind them as the slim, white yacht motored quietly into the harbour.
What was left of the harbour, Peter thought, looking around. The yachts and motor boats that had filled the basin were mostly on the bottom now, broken up and scattered across the sea bed, an unseen, underwater danger to anyone coming in. They slipped into the lee of Goat Island and looked along the darkening shoreline for any intact docks.
"There," Elena said, from the shrouds, pointing a little ahead and to the east.
The yacht was securely moored to the floating concrete jetty in ten minutes, sails furled tight and covered, fenders hanging between topsides and dock, lines coiled and stowed away. Shamsiel sighed at the stillness of the water. The Irin's face was hollowed out from weeks of being able to keep little food down.
In the soft light of the cabin, Penemue and Peter looked at the map spread over the table, the hunter holding a pair of dividers and measuring off a hundred miles from the scale at the lower edge. He swung the dividers across the paper.
"Sixteen hundred miles in the straightest line possible," Peter said, looking at the Qaddiysh.
"Seven weeks on foot," Baraquiel agreed.
"Less if we can find a vehicle." Elena looked at Peter.
He nodded. "The snowfall has been deep this year, across the eastern states and the Midwest. We'll need something that can handle it."
"The roads will also be bad," Elena added, her memories of the European roads still fresh in her mind.
"We'll look in the morning," Penemue said, turning to the galley. "Heaven will not aid us on this leg, for reasons of their own. We will get there as fast as we can get there."
The morning was pearl grey and dripping with moisture, the fog that had followed them to the coast swathing the dock and the trees and remaining buildings and fields and marsh in a clinging nacreous shroud as the sunshine tried to break through.
Peter walked along the snow-covered road, Penemue behind him, Elena following and the two Irin behind her. Despite the bitter temperatures the warmth of the sea close by was melting the snowfall and the sound of running water filled the quiet countryside.
They found the humvee in the underground garage of a modern, slab-built concrete block near the point. No domestic city car but the flat-sided, boxy military model, tyres and electrics intact, a full tank of fuel and a flat battery. Elena found a generator, tucked with an assortment of camping equipment and the pull-start functioned perfectly. Charging the battery would be an overnight chore, jumping it would take a few minutes.
The main bridge going south was in pieces and Peter turned north, threading through the silent and broken neighbourhoods that were largely overgrown with vegetation across the still standing Twenty-Four onto the mainland, turning west and south as they bypassed the larger populated centres.
"Can you feel it?" Shamsiel asked from the comfortably wide back seat.
In the front, next to Elena and Peter, Penemue nodded. "Yes."
He looked past the slim woman to the hunter driving. "We need to find someplace to stop, someplace we can hide. I do not know if they can see you and Elena as clearly, but we are being watched."
Peter frowned and nodded, and Elena straightened in her seat, her gaze scanning the sides of the road.
"By other angels?" she asked Penemue in an undertone.
"Yes."
"How can they see you?"
"They look for the energy we are emit," the Irin said. "As we would watch them, and can see the Grigori if they haven't taken the precautions we're about to make."
"What precautions?" Peter asked, flicking a glance at him.
"You'll see," Shamsiel said from the back, his nose wrinkling up at the thought.
Bouncing on hard shocks along the narrow road, they wound through what once had been open fields and suburban tracts and was now a forest, the asphalt cracked and broken, humped up by the tree roots and dead grass stiffly black-tipped from frost and crushed under the thin icy slush. Peter's admiration for the car's previous owner was growing as the tyres bit into the slippery surface, and the stiff, independent suspension ignored the worsening state of the road.
"There," Penemue said, gesturing to the right. Through the trees, they caught glimpses of the steel and brick building, half its roof sagging and missing sheeting, but the rest looking to be intact.
Peter turned off, following the gravelled drive.
"No, drive right inside," Penemue insisted. Peter looked up at the rafters, black against the pale, overcast sky.
"It is sound," Baraquiel agreed from the back and the hunter drove them into the building hesitantly.
All three Qaddiysh got out and drew their knives, slicing through their forearms and using the blood to make sigils on the remaining walls. Peter and Elena watched them as they drew pouches from their belts.
"We need a fire, just a small one," Shamsiel said, gesturing to the woods beyond the building. Peter nodded and walked out, collecting smaller fallen branches and twigs as Elena moved through the interior of the building and gathered an armful of the dried grasses under the open roof. The fire was small but as Baraquiel put the small bronze bowl over it, the contents heated, flaring brightly for a moment and then melting together to form a thick black paste.
The Qaddiysh stripped off their jackets and shirts, and Elena flinched as Baraquiel drove the point of the black metal blade through the dark skin of Shamsiel's back, a bright red line following the tip as he carved a symbol into the man's skin.
"This is partly Raphael's," Penemue told them, shivering in the cool air as he waited his turn. "He was – is – the Lord of the Air, and it is the properties of Air that we will draw to ourselves, transparency and reflection and misdirection."
The circle on the smooth, ebony skin was exact, straight lines, joined with smaller circles forming a design within it. Baraquiel scooped the warm, black paste onto a fingertip and smeared it over the wound, mixing it with the blood that was still flowing. Shamsiel's breath hissed in, his back contracting involuntarily as pain filled him.
"The paste will make it permanent, the scars will remain, beyond our construct's ability to heal," the black-haired Irin said, paling a little under his tan as he watched his brother's careful movements.
Baraquiel stood in front of him, holding out the knife and closing his eyes. Penemue carved the sigil over his chest, working fast and ignoring the clenching of muscle as the paste worked its way into the skin.
Shamsiel took the knife when he'd finished, and repeated the sigil over his broad back.
"Why didn't the Grigori do this when they fled to the east?" Peter asked Baraquiel, helping him on with his jacket.
"Some did," Baraquiel answered. "That is why we could not see them after the Flood. But some have always put appearance before anything else, and their pride and vanity have allowed us and probably our brothers in Heaven, to track them."
"You didn't know where they were?" Elena looked at him curiously.
He shook his head, long titian hair rippling back over his shoulders. "Heaven could see them." He gestured to the walls of the building, the sigils they'd drawn unseen from the inside. "Markings such as we made here are sufficient to deflect casual observation. And we were insulated in Jordan, insulated and deliberately not looking for our fallen brothers. We believed the Flood had destroyed them, believed that they were gone, because we wanted to believe it."
"Why did they align with Hell?" Peter turned to Penemue, passing him his shirt.
"The unsealing of the tablet reached out and touched everything," Penemue said stiffly, wincing as the cloth dragged over the fresh cuts. "We knew it. Heaven knew it. Michel told us that the Grigori have been active all these centuries, seeking out knowledge, practising the black arts … they are trying to find a way back."
"To Heaven?" Elena asked, astonished.
"Now that Raphael has gathered an army, he may take them back," Shamsiel told her. "He needs followers. They will make whatever bargain he wants and renege on the deal later."
"But Michael … and the Host … surely that is enough of a deterrent even to the most –" Peter said, looking from Penemue to Shamsiel.
"If Michael fights in open battle against Raphael, then Heaven might fall," Penemue said tersely. "The prophecy of the Second War was not ambiguous. Michael will do everything in his power to prevent outright war."
Baraquiel turned to the truck, opening the rear door. "Come, we must get to Kansas as soon as we can, before the Grigori can move an army against them."
Hell
The cemetery didn't look exactly as he remembered, Dean thought, staggering a little to one side as Cas released him. More trees had grown up around and through the plots, and only the gravemarkers that were made of stone had survived. He pulled the medallion from his pocket, slipping it over his head as he looked around. There had been a small mausoleum, to one side. The ghouls had been living in it and the clearing Chuck had described had been just beyond it.
"Dean, are you sure about this?" the angel said from behind him, following as he walked through the tall, dead grass.
"No," Dean said shortly. "But it's the only game in town."
"The gate that Chuck described, they don't open and close on their own," Cas pressed, lengthening his stride, the trenchcoat flapping around his legs as he hurried to catch up to the hunter.
"This one does," Dean said, slowing as he passed the mausoleum. Turning his head, he felt the sigh of warm air against his cheek, caught the whiff of brimstone on it. From the corner of his eye, he saw the air shimmer in the starlight, a sheer curtain rippling in a faint zephyr, turning a little more toward it, it faded and disappeared. "It's open now."
"The guard –"
"Won't see me with this," Dean cut him off, tapping the silver disc around his neck. "I know what I'm doing, Cas."
The angel remained silent, his doubt about that written across his vessel's face.
"Hell time's different," Dean continued, ignoring the angel's lack of faith in him. "I shouldn't be long – no more than a few hours, but you have to be here when I get back."
"I will be," Cas said. "Do you know –?"
Dean turned abruptly and walked straight for the shimmer, eyes slitted as he kept his head turned to the side. He missed the rest of Castiel's sentence as he stepped into a pocket of warmth, and the world disappeared around him.
The slip between the planes was similar to the sensation of being teleported by the angel. Blackness. Silence so loud it roared in his ears. No other sensations transmitted through his nerves – no sight or smell or taste or touch – and a bending, as if he were being turned inside out. His lungs burned as the nothingness continued long past what he expected, then he was in a long valley under a thundery-looking sky, facing a broad, slow-moving river.
Acheron, he thought distractedly, looking along the bank as he walked closer. In the distance he could see a low boat, with a wide, curved hull. He slid into the cover of the willows that lined this side of the river as the crack of a branch sounded on the other side.
Not kidding about the giant dog part. The canine had three heads, and a long, slab-muscled body, high at the shoulder and sloping down to the hindquarters, its coat long and shaggy, the guard hairs lifting and twisting in a wind he couldn't feel. Wolf. Dhole. Hyena. It seemed all three, the centre head undoubtedly that of a wolf, long muzzle and broad forehead, the eyes set in the centre and glowing ember red. The head to the left was carried lower, the shorter muzzle that of the dhole. The head on the right had the misshapen jaw and offset eyes of a hyena, small and dark in the massive skull. All three necks converged into an impossibly broad chest and enormous shoulders.
He didn't have anything definitive to judge the height against. Perhaps six or seven feet at the join between spine and shoulder, he thought. Each neck was adorned by a collar, glittering slightly in the carnelian light.
"I don't care what happens to the souls," a roughened voice came from the river, and Dean turned his head fractionally to watch the boat coming closer over the oily, black water. "Just make sure you deliver anyone you see to this gate."
British accent. Short, receding black hair. Dark eyes.
Crowley. Dean's attention sharpened as he recognised the demon. The boat was handled by a man – of sorts, Dean reconsidered the definition as he got a closer look – manoeuvring the craft to the bank skilfully with a long, single scull. He was tall and broad through the chest and shoulders, his skin tinted grey, or silver, his hair a wild red mane that spilled over shoulders and back. The boatman. Charon.
The demon stepped onto the shore and turned back to look at him. "No one gets through here without meeting the hound, understand?"
Charon nodded, pushing the prow of the boat off the shore and digging the scull into the water, the boat spinning on its long axis and moving downstream again. The boatman's face turned to the bank where Dean was hiding, the craggy, broken features partially hidden by a tangle of red beard, flat silver eyes passing over him without changing expression. He let out a soft exhale as the boat moved away, looking back at the other side of the river.
All three heads of the dog were lowered now, ears pricked forward as they listened to their master. Crowley's voice was too low for him to overhear the instructions to the hound, but he had little doubt that it followed the gist of the instructions to the ferryman. He wondered if the demon was normally this paranoid, or if what'd happened with the Grigori had gotten back to him.
On this side of the river, trees and grass were living, the willows he crouched under trailing long, delicately green fronds into the water. On the other side, however, nothing was alive bar the hound and the demon that he could see. No tree or plant of any description put its roots into the greyish-black soil that ran up from the river bank to the towering rock walls behind it. Puffs and tendrils of smoke rose from that soil further up river, curling into the unmoving air, grey edged with yellow, and added to the miasma of the low cloud overhead. He thought it was a pretty safe bet that the river itself was poisonous on the other side, despite the mythology about it. Crowley had been fairly careful not to allow the water to touch his meatsuit's polished black shoes.
Which left him with a single option. A not very appealing option.
The demon disappeared and the dog turned around, padding back through the rising vapours until it disappeared. He studied the rock wall carefully, taking note of the odd protrusions and colours that would mark it as a gate and he stood slowly, heading down the river's edge in the direction the ferryman had gone.
The river followed close to the curving ramparts of the valley wall. River Acheron marks one of the borders of Hell, Bobby'd said, years ago when they'd been trying to find a way out of the deal. The Styx flowed from it, a tributary leading to another entrance to the earthly plane. Charon plied the length of the rivers that flowed through the underworld, appearing and disappearing as needed, apparently.
He found a small stone quay a few hundred yards down river. Four people stood there, three men and a woman, none of them speaking as they stared at the dark gleam of the river's current.
Looking around, Dean realised that mist shrouded this side as well. Not the poisonous fumes of the pit, rising through the soil, but an ordinary mist, thicker and thinner as a vagrant breeze stirred it. A curtain between this antechamber and the real world, he wondered. Or a means of isolating the souls who'd been sent here? He looked back at the river as the boat bumped alongside the stone blocks, lengthening his stride to join the hellbound souls as they climbed listlessly on board.
The boatman stood in the stern, his face impassive, his hand held out. One by one, the men and woman dropped a silver coin into it, moving to the bow to take their seats. Dean crowded close to the last man, turning to follow him as his coin jingled against the others and stopping as the huge hand of Charon closed around his shoulder.
He looked up at the craggy face, eyes widening. "You can see me?"
Charon nodded, and thrust his open palm toward him, the coins on it painted with the red light.
"Uh …," Dean said, digging into his pockets for change. He pulled out the car keys, and a couple of tarnished pennies, looking back at the boatman's face. Charon shook his head, his gaze moving to the man's chest.
The medallion lay there, Dean knew, a silver disc reflecting the reddened sky in the same way the coins were. He shook his head. He needed that. He dug his hands into the pockets of his jacket, feeling through them in the futile hope that he hadn't cleaned them out anytime in the last three years. His fingers felt the small shape and he pulled it out. The coin was a half dollar, a 1949 Franklin his father had given him in 2003. He looked at it for a long moment, then dropped it into Charon's hand. The boatman closed his fingers around the coins, the flat, silvery gaze closing. Then he nodded and Dean breathed a sigh of relief, taking a seat behind the man he'd followed on board.
The boat drifted out into the current and began to move. It took less than a minute to reach the far shore, in front of the gate where he'd seen the dog and the demon. The prow nudged the black shore and the woman and men climbed out, Dean getting to his feet to follow them. He froze as the hand once again gripped his shoulder, the boatman's fingers like steel, cold and crushing the muscle to the bone beneath.
"Go between them," Charon rumbled softly. "Not at the end or the beginning."
Dean nodded mutely and the fingers released him. He hurried to the others, slipping in between the first man and the woman as Cerberus padded out of the mists, ropey, yellow saliva dripping from the open jaws.
Dean reached up and slid the medallion under his shirt, feeling the metal warm instantly against his skin. Make or break, he thought, his mouth drying out as the dog looked at him, three sets of blood-red eyes seemingly fixed on his face. The rock wall split apart ahead of the first man, grating over the ground, heat and the stench of sulphur blasting out over them. The dog's eyes moved to the man behind him, and he followed the woman into the slit of darkness, the sweat rolling down his face owing nothing to the furnace-like heat in the mountain.
As soon as they had entered the rock tunnel, the souls ahead and behind him vanished and he stopped, looking around reflexively. He could almost hear a sound at the edge of his senses, a scraping, chittering sound, like claws over stone. Could almost see the glimmers of light reflecting from something that wasn't within the range of his eye sight. Could almost smell the bitter acid smell of leathern skin and blood that wasn't really blood.
Almost. But not quite.
The memories flooded back, vast nets made of tightly tensioned wire and littered with hooks and chains; open areas of sand and rock and the snap of bone and screams and –
He looked around the dim tunnel. The light wasn't actually light, he knew. He could see shapes but they weren't really there. He could hear sounds, but they weren't there either.
In my fear, I forgot who I was, forgot what I had come here for, forgot everything I'd known. And I wandered, lost and disoriented, for an unknown length of time.
Felix had pulled the account of the soldier who'd gotten into – and out of – Hell. Dean leaned against the rock and forced himself to focus, to remember what he needed to remember, to keep every other thought away. He needed a key to get back here. Reaching into his pocket he pulled out the Colt automatic. It was useless in here, but he'd carried it since he was twenty-five, and it would guide him back. He tucked the gun into a crevice in the wall, the ivory of the grip washed to a gruesome pink in the not-light.
The tunnels were a maze, shifting as I walked down them. I beat my hands against the walls until they were bloody and still I would find myself back in the same passages, time after time. Until I remembered.
He'd never seen the tablet. Chuck hadn't described it too well either. Stone. Not large. Tapered edges. Engraved with a language that was not recognisable. His eyes screwed shut in frustration.
I saw the sword in my mind, saw it shining in a pillar of light, and I felt the plane move around me, the endless corridors filled with wind become straight and still, the enormous chambers stop fixed in their locations. And I felt the sword, felt its presence as I walked forward, my eyes closed and its image clear in my head. And reaching out, my fingers found the hilt of it and I drew it to me.
He thought of everything he knew about it, everything he'd read, everything he'd been told. The imagination that had cursed and saved him throughout his life filled in the details from those memories, and he saw it finally, sitting in a pool of lamplight on a desk. He took a step forward and felt the vertiginous shift in the floor, the walls, the structure that surrounded him, felt the wrench in the spaces in his skull and the hollows between his organs, felt the heat disappear, the air still, the silence drop over him.
Dean reached out and felt the slightly oily surface of the stone beneath his fingertips, rough where the symbols had been carved. He opened his eyes as his hand closed around it, feeling an odd, doubling sensation in his mind as he looked at the stone, the symbols blurring for a moment and moving across the surface of the smoothed rock. Then his vision returned to normal and he picked it up, wrapping it in a layer of cloth and settling it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
Then he looked around. He was in a room, perhaps twenty-five by thirty feet, panelled in old, darkly stained timber, a small fire blazing in a Victorian fireplace on the other side of the ornately engraved and polished black desk in front of him. Richly coloured carpet covered the floor and glass-fronted bookcases lined two of the long walls. There were no windows, but otherwise it looked like a … gentleman's study.
No accounting for taste, he told himself sourly, turning around. He had to get back to the gate.
The gun was easy to visualise. He knew every curved line chased onto the polished chrome barrel, every seam in the ivory worn to its shape by his hand, every nick in the metal and every part, moving or otherwise. Closing his eyes, he saw the angle of it in the crevice and the wrenching sensation rose up around him, spinning without moving, the accursed plane changing itself around him and taking him back without him needing to take a step. When his stomach stop rolling, he opened his eyes, smiling a little as he reached out for the gun in front of him.
Not so hard, he thought smugly. Just the rock door, the river and the gate and Cas there to take them both home. He glanced at his watch, seeing the hands stopped at the precise time he'd entered the gate. Not so great, but it wouldn't matter that much. He couldn't been more than a couple of hours.
He tucked the gun back into the pocket of his jacket, fingers brushing over the tablet at the same time as he stepped forward to the rock wall and pushed.
Nothing happened.
He pushed again, both hands now, and the wall remained a wall, immovable and unchanged. Sliding his palms over the surface, he felt for the edges, moving to the left and right as far as the short tunnel allowed. It was smooth. Seamless.
Solid.
The way in was not, apparently, the way out.