Supernatural 10 - Rite of Passage (22 page)

“Not by a long shot,” McClary declared. Then, quieter, he said, “Maybe I’ve read too much Stephen King, but I’m starting to doubt it was even human.”

“Certainly a possibility.”

“What?
If I were you, I’d be calling me crazy.”

Bobby smiled. “No,” he said, “I wouldn’t—and neither will they.”

The blue Monte Carlo swung into the lot, veered toward
the storefront and pulled up to the curb in front of Bobby. Dean climbed out of the driver’s side a moment after Sam exited the passenger side.

One of the two remaining cruisers swooped in with a short siren blast.

“They’re with me,” Bobby informed McClary. “My specialists: Tom and John Smith.”

McClary waved off the support, then spoke into his radio. “Hernandez, wait around back with the bodies. Call an ambulance and notify the county coroner.”

“B—Agent Willis, you okay?” Sam asked, catching himself just in time. “The cell phone was useless.”

“But we remembered Roy’s police scanner,” Dean finished. “Followed the chatter here.”

“Tom, John,” Bobby said, “this is Sergeant McClary, Laurel Hill P.D. Friend of Roy’s. Supervised Lucas Dempsey. Already explained you’re specialists I’ve worked with previously.”

They shook hands and McClary seemed to take their measure. Bobby was confident McClary had no reason to doubt him after what they had been through.

“Got our work cut out for us, boys,” Bobby said. “Sumbitch shrugged off bullets like they were paintball pellets.”

“Specialists,” McClary said to the Winchesters. “So you’ve dealt with this sort of thing before.”

“Um, what sort of thing, exactly?” Sam asked, looking from McClary to Bobby and back again, wondering if McClary had peeked at their hunter playbook or read a few chapters.

“Leaps buildings in a single bound,” McClary said. “Throws human bodies around like beach balls at a summer concert. Has a pair of horns growing out of his head. That sort of thing.”

“Oh,” Sam said, and cleared his throat. “Then yes, more or less.”

McClary’s radio crackled to life.

“Sergeant, I’m behind the shopping plaza,” Hernandez said, “and we have a problem.”

“Speak.”

“I found two bodies.”

“Two?”

“Yes, sir,” Hernandez said. “Gravino is missing.”

Nineteen

“Balls,” Bobby exclaimed for the third time since he and the Winchesters had returned to Roy’s cabin from the shopping center by way of the police station. Bobby wanted his car on hand in case they needed to split up.

“Stop kicking yourself, Bobby,” Sam said. “You couldn’t know.”

“An obvious ploy,” Bobby said. “Gets the cavalry to chase his shadow and doubles back. Hell, I had a hunch and didn’t follow it. Now Gravino’s body’s missing.”

McClary had stayed at the crime scene, upset with himself as well, but he had caught Bobby’s arm before he left with Sam and Dean and whispered fiercely, “We need to talk. Off the record. After I’m done with the official paperwork.”

Bobby had nodded and gripped the man’s shoulder. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“You’re sure the cop was dead?” Dean asked.

“Course I’m sure, ya idjit,” Bobby said, irritated. But Dean could tell Bobby’s anger was directed inward. “Horned sumbitch skewered his throat with that cane.”

“Even if you had gone back,” Sam reasoned, “you couldn’t have stopped him. You said so yourself. You shot him four times, McClary hit him twice.”

“Why take a corpse?” Dean asked. “Why that corpse?”

Bobby glared at him for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Fresher.”

“For food?” Sam wondered.

“Maybe,” Dean said, shrugging. “Maybe it animates corpses.”

“Hasn’t played that tune so far,” Bobby said, considering.

“The point is,” Dean continued, “we don’t know. We can’t guess where this thing will strike next, or why, because we don’t know what the hell it is.”

“Dean’s right,” Bobby said. “We’re twisting in the wind.”

“I guess we can rule out the Leviathan at least,” Sam said.

“For a bright side,” Bobby observed, “that ain’t sayin’ much.”

“We know he creates bad luck, causes accidents,” Sam said.

“Makes bad situations worse,” Dean added, “spreads sickness.”

“Sickness?” Bobby asked. “You tied him to the outbreaks?”

Sam filled him in on the preschool owner’s account of a tall man with a bowler and a cane handing a ball back to the young boy who became Patient Zero.

“McClary and I were in the emergency room,” Bobby
said. “Place was overflowing, like a plague ward. Heard talk among the staff about four cases of West Nile virus, for Pete’s sake. So, accidents, disasters, illness, disease. Look hard enough, bet we find reports of crop failure.”

“Any suspects come to mind?” Sam asked as he plugged the laptop into a phone jack to use Roy’s dial-up internet service. He winced as if in pain as the modem squawked and dinged its way to a slow connection.

Bobby frowned. “My collection of lore’s locked in a storage unit. Puts me at a disadvantage. Let’s run it down … Even if I hadn’t seen the damn thing, we’re a few hours from the Jersey coast, so rule out merpeople or sirens.”

“‘Merpeople’?” Dean asked.

“Lured sailors to their destruction,” Bobby said. “Bad omens. Foretold disaster, but some believed they also caused it.”

“A duwende?” Sam suggested, skimming an article. “They can cause bad luck.”

“Too small,” Bobby said. “We’re looking for something triple-XL.”

“Same deal with the mothman,” Sam said. “Its appearance supposedly foretold disasters, including the ’67 Silver Bridge collapse at rush hour. Forty-six people died. Maybe he does more than predict disasters.”

“Mothman had large wings,” Bobby said. “Explains the moniker. This guy had horns, not wings, unless he had a pair tucked under his suit …”

“And why climb when you can fly?” Dean pointed out.

“No mention of weapons, either,” Bobby said. “This
thing swung its cane like a sword… or a club. Carries it in plain sight.”

“A club,” Sam said thoughtfully, “bound in iron…” He clicked a few keys, read quickly and looked up at them. “I know what it is.”

“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Bobby said.

“It’s a creature from Japanese folklore,” Sam said. “An oni. Humanoid, gigantic, described as an ogre or troll, two horns growing out of its head, sometimes an odd number of eyes or fingers, carries an iron club—a
kanabo.
Sounds like very bad news. It’s described as invincible, causes diseases and disaster, is associated with bad luck, misfortune, and known to consume human flesh.”

“Gravino,” Bobby said. “Fresh meat.”

“So we’ve got an oni on our hands,” Dean said. “And it’s invincible.”

“Need an invincibility loophole,” Bobby said.

“Any tips on how to gank it?” Dean asked.

Sam frowned, scrolled around, and clicked another link. “There’s something here about a demon gate, warding off the oni.”

“Horse left that barn,” Bobby said. “I recall something about a ceremony to expel an oni.”

“The
oni-yahari
ceremony,” Sam said, and raised his eyebrows, “involves villagers throwing soybeans out of their homes and chanting ‘Oni go out, blessings come in.’”

“All the earmarks of whistling past a graveyard,” Bobby said, disgusted.

“Right,” Dean agreed. “I am not fighting this thing with a
bag of beans. We’ve gotta find something else.”

Tora walked along the produce aisle, ostensibly checking bundles of carrots, heads of lettuce and assorted apples, but his attention was focused on the young woman with dark brown hair ten paces ahead of him. Five minutes before, the oni had followed her into Robertson’s Market. From her navy blue skirt suit, he assumed she had an office job, one with some responsibility, as she had apparently worked late on a Friday and had yet to change into more casual clothes. She wore no engagement ring or wedding band and, rather than pushing a shopping cart and stocking up for a family, she carried a plastic basket containing a few small items. She was young and appeared healthy enough for his plans—and without the attachment of a spouse or family who might report her missing before the oni had time to finish the ritual. Unless she worked weekends as well, her coworkers would not note her absence until it was too late.

He had no intention of buying anything from the market and he walked the aisles primarily to assess the woman, but he couldn’t resist nurturing strains of salmonella, e-coli and listeria, increasing their potency and resistance to antibiotics while spreading them to every surface and each item he touched.

Once he had convinced himself the woman was a good candidate, he proceeded toward the exit. As he passed a partially enclosed office behind an information desk, he spotted a grainy photograph of himself being displayed on a small television set. A news bulletin was warning civilians
to contact police if they saw him. Sometimes he forgot how efficiently humans in this age disseminated information.

As he was not yet ready to tip his hand, Tora must remember to fade from human perception when his power was not otherwise engaged. Though hidden electronic surveillance cameras might capture his image, he could channel his power so that humans focused their attention elsewhere, overlooking him, despite his imposing size.

He left the supermarket empty-handed and waited next to the woman’s silver Nissan Altima in his blue and white Chevy conversion van.

He had acquired the vehicle behind a store from a shop owner who had the misfortune to run into the oni while locking up for the night. With the dead police officer slung over his shoulder, the oni convinced the proprietor that he needed to get the cop to the emergency room immediately. The man wanted to call 911, but the oni persuaded him that driving to the hospital in the van would save time.

“Oh, but I’d be keeping you from your family,” the oni said, as if reconsidering the emergency call option.

“I’m recently divorced,” the man said bitterly. “I live alone.”

“Well, I could wait here for the ambulance…” the oni said.

“No, you’re right. This is faster.” With that, the owner opened the rear doors of the van.

But when the oni laid out Officer Gravino on the carpeted interior, the shopkeeper finally saw the mortal wound in the cop’s throat and slowly backed away.

“That man’s dead,” the shopkeeper whispered. “What have you—?”

Tora shoved his cane under the man’s jaw and drove the point up through the roof of his mouth and into his brain with such force the man’s feet left the ground. For a few seconds his arms and legs twitched and his eyes rolled back in his head. Then his body slumped, lifeless, suspended in mid-air by the cane. With his free hand, the oni opened the back door of the store wide enough to heave the corpse into the room. After locking that door, he closed the rear van doors and drove away.

En route to his hideaway, Tora stopped at a traffic light and noticed the young woman in the car next to him. On a whim, he followed her a few blocks and waited until she parked in the supermarket lot before he pulled in beside her car.

To keep the storefront in view, he had backed the van into its parking space. Through gaps in the windows between large posters proclaiming double coupons and other special offers, he watched her enter an express checkout lane near the exit. Before she left the store, he started the van and drove to the far side of the parking lot, pulling into a space where he could watch her car through his side-view mirror.

She opened the car door lock with a key fob button and climbed in with two small plastic bags of groceries that she placed on the passenger seat before buckling her seatbelt. A moment later, she started the car, turned on her headlights and drove from the lot. He followed at a discreet distance.

Within a half-mile, she left the commercial district and turned onto a state road with longer gaps between traffic lights and a limited number of streetlights. Tora gradually
accelerated, closing the gap between her Altima and the van to several hundred feet. Before he had climbed back into the van, he had nicked the base of the valve stem on her rear driver’s side tire with his hardened and darkening thumbnail. Pressing his right index finger to his temple, he focused his power, reaching out to apply pressure to the compromised valve stem. This was about fine control. He must create enough damage to drain the tire, but not so much that it triggered a blowout, which might startle the woman and cause her to crash. If she suffered a serious injury, she would be useless for his ritual. Of course, he could keep her body for its food value, but he already had a fresh human corpse for his larder.

Her tire began to thump and wobble, the metal rim digging into the flattened rubber. After a few seconds, she noticed the problem, coasted onto the shoulder and turned on her hazard lights. Two hundred feet behind her, he slowed his approach, giving her time to react to the roadside inconvenience. As he neared, he noticed the telltale glow of an activated cell phone near her cheek.

Of course, wearing formal clothes she would want to avoid the grimy task of changing a flat tire, which is why he planned to offer assistance. But if she had the services of an automobile club, she might decline the offer of help from a stranger.