Supernatural 10 - Rite of Passage (2 page)

Though the quick movement in front of the window had startled her, pulling her attention from the task at hand, she could have sworn she had heard a thud near the Dumpster and couldn’t imagine what Sedenko’s crew might have tossed off the nearly restored roof. She stood there for a few moments, soapy water dripping from her hands, as a grim possibility dawned on her. But, no, she would have heard
yelling, sounds of alarm, when all she heard was—

Another impact made her flinch.

The second impact seemed impossibly loud, perhaps because she had been listening for a reaction from the roofers after the first. She wiped her sopping hands with a dishtowel as she hurried to the front door. Stepping outside, she called, “Mr. Sedenko, I thought I heard …”

She froze under the small portico, not believing her eyes.

Sedenko appeared to be performing an awkward backflip off the roof.

His face swept beneath his body and slammed into the sidewalk that ran along the side of the house to the driveway. Under the full weight of his falling body, his neck snapped and Michelle knew without a moment’s doubt that he’d died instantly. The damaged gutter creaked in the slight breeze and a section of the downspout clanked to the ground.

“Oh, my God!” she whispered.

Hands to her mouth, Michelle stumbled forward as if trapped in a horrible dream, her gaze traveling past Sedenko’s body, to a second broken body beside the long Dumpster— Greg something—with blood pooling around a disfigured skull, and a third body a few feet from Greg’s. Mike. She remembered his name was Mike. It looked like another broken neck. She looked to her new roof, almost expecting a murderous fourth workman to return her gaze. What else could cause three experienced roofers to fall to their deaths, one after the other? Somebody must have shoved them from the roof. But nobody was there, and she had only ever seen three of them working together on the roof.

She backed away from the bodies, retreating to her door, her breathing shallow, on the verge of panic. She glanced distractedly toward the curb where the Sedenko Roofing van was parked. Beyond the red maple that overhung her driveway was a tall, broad-chested man in a bowler hat and black suit walking as if he hadn’t a care in the world, practically twirling his cane. He must have seen something.

“Call 911!” Michelle shouted. “These men are dead!”

He glanced at her with an inquisitive smile and cupped a hand behind his ear, as if he couldn’t hear her.

She looked from him to the three dead men sprawled across her property in plain sight.

“Oh, never mind!”

Hurrying, she grabbed her front door and flung it open. The edge of the door struck her in the face, below her right eye. Only when she pressed her hand to her face did she realize she had been crying, probably since the moment Sedenko fell. She glanced at her palm, wondering if she would find blood there, and experienced a measure of relief that she hadn’t lacerated her face, immediately followed by guilt for fretting over a possible flesh wound when three men had just died.

She ran across the kitchen to grab the wall phone— quicker than locating her cell phone in her voluminous pocketbook—but the heel of her shoe skidded across a patch of wet tile and she fell hard on her rear, belatedly cursing her clumsiness. As she grabbed the counter to pull herself upright, her hand closed over the knife she had used to slice carrots for her salad but had neglected to wash afterward. The sharp blade bit into her fingers, drawing blood.

After another string of muttered curses, Michelle took several deep breaths to calm herself before climbing gingerly to her feet and carefully lifting the cordless receiver off the base with her uninjured hand. She dialed 911 with exaggerated care, wrapping the damp towel around her bleeding fingers to slow the flow of blood as she waited for the emergency operator to pick up

She looked out of the kitchen window, scanning right to left and back again, but saw no sign of the tall man in the black suit.

Tora hadn’t intended for the homeowner to notice him. When not actively engaged in wielding his destructive power, he could fade from human perception—a shadow at the periphery of their vision, a sound too muffled to identify— but this cloaking ability required conscious effort on his part and he hadn’t bothered. Nevertheless, he was surprised she called to him for assistance as, clearly, all three men were beyond the need for medical intervention. But he knew shock and fear made people irrational, which often worked to his advantage.

Feigning ignorance or incompetence or some combination thereof, he continued on his way, assuming he would be forgotten by the middle-aged woman as she suffered an inevitable series of painful accidents—though none as devastating as the trifecta experienced by the roofers. Subtlety was not in his nature and while the roofers’ deaths were not a grand gesture, they were a definitive statement
declaring his arrival.

Less than two blocks away, he noticed a man standing on a ladder propped against a thick tree branch wielding a chains aw to cut away a damaged fork of the branch that overhung the roof of his garage. Spinning the ironbound handle of his cane in his palm, he smiled and watched as the man leaned away from the ladder, shifting his center of gravity. Another possibility

With an efficient slicing motion, the man on the ladder severed the damaged section. As it fell, the healthy part of the branch sprang upward, depriving the top of the ladder of its support. The ladder pitched forward and the man’s engaged arms swept down, driving the saw’s chain through his jeans and grinding into the meat of his thigh before he could release it.

Roaring in pain, he fell across the aluminum ladder, splitting his nose against one of the rungs. He rolled onto his back, both hands clutching at the raw wound in his leg. Blood gushed out, squirting between the man’s fingers, dying his jeans and his lawn crimson. The chainsaw had sliced into the femoral artery. If the blow to his head hadn’t already made him woozy, the rapid loss of blood would have done the job.

In his final moments, the dying man saw a dark figure through the mask of blood from his mashed nose and reached out with a trembling hand, his mouth working but his voice no more than a fading whisper. Then, without so much as a last gasp, his arm fell back, his unblinking eyes staring at nothing.

Tapping the handle of his cane against his palm, Tora
looked across the lawn at the blood-spattered and idle chainsaw, silent now thanks to the safety feature known as a dead man’s switch.

Sometimes,
he thought,
they make it too easy.

Dark energy had begun to buzz inside him, like a fire he would stoke as his plans developed.

He strode toward the heart of the town.

One

Dean Winchester parked their latest beater—a rust-speckled blue and white Plymouth Duster from the mid-seventies that shimmied whenever the speedometer topped sixty miles per hour—a hundred yards downwind from the isolated Victorian house in upstate New York, then he and his younger brother, Sam, climbed out of the old car and eased the doors shut. Side by side, they strode up the deserted two-lane country road toward the dilapidated home. Dean cast anxious glances in all directions, careful to check the late-afternoon sky directly overhead. Sam looked from the scrap of paper in his hand to the sprawling home, pausing by a battered green mailbox atop a leaning wooden post with the three-digit house number painted in black on its side.

“Is this the place?” Dean asked.

“636 High Hill Road.” Sam nodded toward the paper in
his hand. “That’s what the mailman gave us.”

“It looks abandoned,” Dean commented. A gross understatement.

Twenty years ago, maybe ten, the beige Victorian, with bold green trim on the posts and railings of the wraparound first- and second-story porches, backed by a three-story octagonal tower topped by a widow’s walk, had probably been an impressive residence. But the intervening years had not been kind. Paint had faded and cracked, and wooden posts were split or missing, as if carted off by giant termites from a lost Roger Corman film. Gaps between wispy, moth-eaten curtains behind fly-specked windows revealed uninviting darkness within.

“I guess they don’t entertain much,” Sam said quietly as they approached the front door.

Before Dean climbed the porch steps, Sam caught his arm and pointed downward.

A greasy gray feather lay on one warped step.

“Right place,” Dean whispered.

As they crossed the porch, the wooden planks creaked under their weight.
So much for the element of surprise,
Dean thought. He knocked, waited in vain for an answer, and knocked again, louder. He shot a glance at his brother. Sam shrugged. For a silent moment, Dean debated picking the lock versus kicking in the door or putting an elbow through a window, but was spared the decision when an irritated voice shouted, “Go away!”

“Animal control,” Dean yelled. “We’re investigating reports of illegally imported birds.”

Sam and Dean had spent a week investigating multiple disappearances in the Adirondacks. The victims had been young and old; several solitary joggers, a night shift worker on a smoking break, a woman walking her Pomeranian, a camper who wandered off to answer a call of nature, an insomniac who stepped out on his balcony for some fresh air, and a hiker who had left his group for a more challenging ascent. All the victims had been out alone after dark. Otherwise, no similarities, no pattern an FBI profiler would ever unravel. Families received no ransom calls or notes. No bodies were found. There were no witnesses. No fresh tire tracks or suspicious vehicles lurking in the area of the disappearances. It was as if the victims had vanished off the face of the earth.

That had the Winchesters—who often found answers outside the box—wondering if someone or, more likely,
something
had, literally, lifted them off the earth. Sam had made the suggestion first. Dean wondered if they were dealing with dragon abductions again, but fellow hunter Bobby Singer noticed a dark, grimy feather on the side of the road near where the police had found the cowering Pomeranian. Return trips to several of the crime scenes turned up a few more feathers.

After reviewing the timeline, they determined that the first disappearance—a jogger—occurred shortly after the arrival in town of three odd women, the Yerakidis sisters. Their behavior bordered on reclusive, but on rare occasions they would appear in town for supplies, always together, wearing bulky, hooded cloaks, no matter the weather. They talked to one another, heads bobbing together in brief intimate exchanges, but rarely spoke to anyone else. According to clerks in stores they patronized, they seemed to lack social skills, resisting attempts by anyone to engage them in casual conversation.

“Go! Away!” the shrill voice repeated.

Sam shrugged, unsurprised by the hostile reception.

Dean raised his fist to knock on the door, but paused when it was yanked open.

The hooded head of a woman with a pinched face darted forward through the foot-wide gap in the doorway, as if she meant to bite Dean. She had black marble eyes over a hooked nose and a wide, almost lipless mouth.

“Last warning,” she squawked, her words punctuated with a blast of foul breath.

Before Dean could utter a reply, she slammed the door in his face.

They heard the deadbolt click, followed by an eerie silence.

Dean nodded and took a step back. “On my count,” he said to Sam, who moved beside him. “One, two …
three!”

The combined force of their kicks smashed the deadbolt free of the weathered doorjamb and the door burst open, rattling on rusty hinges. Pulling their automatics, they entered the house, backs to each other as they sighted along the muzzles of their pistols.

A mixed bag of threadbare and damaged furniture cluttered the first floor. Boxes lined the walls, stacked high enough in places to block several windows and cast the rooms into unnatural gloom. Everything looked as if it had
been abandoned by the prior tenants.

A sudden movement caught Dean’s attention.

A cloaked figure pitched toward him.

He held his fire at the last moment, recognizing an empty cloak draped over a coat rack.
But who had
—

Behind him, Sam’s gun roared.

There was another blur of movement as something swooped toward him from the stairwell landing. His own shot missed as it crashed into him, knocking him over the back of a grimy sofa onto an oval coffee table that collapsed under his weight, taking Dean’s breath away.

In the fall, Dean had lost his gun. Expecting an immediate follow-up attack, he rolled to the side and grabbed a detached table leg to wield as a makeshift club. Instead, the wooden leg became a crude shield as one of the sisters hurled a crumbling cardboard box filled with hardbound books at him.

Across the room, Sam ducked and leaned away from a flurry of claw swipes by a second sister. He got off another wild shot before she caught him off balance and hurled him against an empty hutch. As he staggered away, she dumped the hutch on top of him, then whirled on her heel and bolted up the stairs.