Supernatural 10 - Rite of Passage (25 page)

The cop in the back of the van,
she thought immediately. Her gaze lowered to check his face. She screamed.

His body ended at the bloody stump of his neck. He’d been decapitated.

Shrieking, she lurched against her bonds, twisting and pulling with all her strength, hoping to break free of the ropes or dislodge the eyebolt in the ceiling. After thrashing helplessly for what felt like ten minutes, she sagged in exhaustion, panting as the white spots in her vision disappeared one by one.

“You are strong,” he said. “Good. That strength will help you survive the ritual.”

Pivoting on her big toe, she twisted so she could see her kidnapper. He sat on a high stool behind the shoe counter. The cubbyholes behind him held a half-dozen unmatched shoes, abandoned just like the damaged bowling balls, too worthless to sell.

With his hands positioned on either side of a scuffed red bowling ball bag, the tall man smiled at her. “I wanted you awake for this.”

“Are you—are you planning to … kill me?”

“If I wanted you dead, you would be dead.”

“Then what?” Kim asked, horrible possibilities rising to the surface of her mind faster than she could push them back down.

“I have special plans for you,” he said gravely. “I want to bring you through the demon gate.”

“What—what does that mean?”

“In time,” he said. “First, I want you to witness this.”

He reached into the bowling bag and she braced herself, sensing what was in the bag. For a moment, she squeezed her
eyes shut, but then she had to look—

—at the severed head of the dead cop.

“Oh, God—oh, God—oh, God,” she whispered.

She felt her gorge rise and gagged as bile burned her throat.

“You see,” he said slowly, raising his fingers toward the cop’s head, “they must shed their human face. That is the first step.”

His fingernails were angled into sharp points and seemed unnaturally thick, like animal claws. With the fingernail of his index finger, he dug into the top of the cop’s forehead and peeled a long strip of skin away from the face. Then another one. And another.

She screamed until her voice failed.

Dean stood watching the television news at low volume, tapping the red marker against his palm. Dr. Charlotte Kinzie, the news station’s medical expert, was explaining to the anchor that the Burlington County Health Department had declared additional outbreaks of food poisoning, mentioning salmonella, listeria and e-coli, traced to a local supermarket. In addition to the new outbreaks, the influenza and MRSA cases were reaching epidemic proportions, with over a dozen deaths. While she spoke, the station aired footage of a packed emergency room, doctors and nurses hurrying through the hallways, followed by a brief interview with an elderly doctor who declared the situation to be the worst he had experienced in his forty years in medicine. He mentioned that the new strain of influenza was deadlier than the one Laurel Hill experienced eighteen years ago, only
three years into his tenure at Laurel Hill General.

Sam had had his nose glued to the laptop all morning, spending half his time checking for new accidents of a bizarre nature and relaying the incident locations to Dean so he could update their oversized town map, and the other half seeking additional lore for ways to defeat the oni.

“A guy fell cleaning his gutters,” Sam said. “Died.”

“Normal accident?”

“He impaled his brain on a garden hoe.”

“I’ll add it with a question mark.”

Bobby, dressed in his Fed suit and ready to roll, hung around long enough to take an old-school approach, calling hunters he had worked with over the years, looking for anyone who may have crossed paths with an oni.

“The town’s scheduled to have a fiftieth anniversary parade tomorrow. We could try the soybean casting-out ceremony,” Sam suggested.

“Definitely Plan B,” Dean said. “Maybe Plan C.”

Knuckles rapped impatiently on the front door.

“Did somebody order pizza?” Dean asked.

“For breakfast?” Sam said.

“Well, it ain’t Roy,” Bobby said as he covered his phone. “It’s his place.”

“Maybe he lost his key?” Dean wondered aloud. But his internal paranoia meter had started ticking.

Bobby walked toward the door as he ended his call. “Thanks, Digger,” he said into his cell phone. “Find anything, call me pronto. I’ll owe you.”

Dean looked at Sam and mouthed “Digger?” Sam shrugged.

Bobby glanced through the curtained window beside the door. “It’s McClary.”

Dean frowned. “Were you expecting him?”

“Didn’t schedule a play date, if that’s what you mean.”

Bobby reached for the doorknob.

“Hold up a second.”

Dean hurried to the kitchen, grabbing Sam’s arm on the way. “Back my play.”

Sam looked confused, but withheld his questions.

Dean set a meat cleaver on the countertop and gave Sam a meaningful nod. Then he pulled a jug of borax from beneath the sink and poured the liquid over a striped dishtowel. He wrung it out just shy of sopping. With his hands wet from the cleanser, he moved toward Bobby, dishtowel in hand.

“Now.”

Bobby shook his head. “This ain’t—”

“Think about it,” Dean said. “If he’s a Big Mouth, this is how he’d gank us. Isolated. No witnesses.”

Outside, McClary knocked again, louder.

“Naturally, he’d knock first,” Bobby said dryly.

“Catch us with our guard down,” Sam said, swayed by Dean’s argument.

Dean nodded to the door, ready.

Bobby shook his head. “You’re starting to remind me of Frank.”

As soon as Bobby pulled the door open, McClary, in uniform, burst into the room.

Dean stepped in front of him, pretended to dry off with the soaked towel, and extended his right hand. “Welcome, Sergeant.”

A distracted frown flickered across McClary’s face, but he reflexively shook Dean’s offered hand, then looked down at his own—now dripping harmlessly with borax.

“I think you missed a spot,” he said.

“Yeah, sorry,” Dean apologized, feeling the tension leave his body. He had been ready to spring into action at the first sign of burning, melting Leviathan flesh. “I’ll grab a fresh towel.”

Before turning his attention to McClary, Bobby shot Dean an “I told you so” glare. Dean responded with a minuscule “better safe than sorry” shrug.

“I’m here unofficially,” McClary said, “about as unofficially as unofficial gets.”

“I expected a call, Sergeant,” Bobby said to the agitated cop, “not a personal visit.”

“Sorry. I haven’t slept,” McClary said, pacing around the small room. “I’m kinda wired.”

“We hadn’t noticed,” Dean remarked as he offered the man a fresh towel from the kitchen.

“About last night…” Bobby said.

“Want to know what I wrote in my report?”

“Okay.”

“Absolutely nothing about horns.”

“Wise omission.”

“I suggested the assailant
may
have been wounded,” McClary said. “Know why?”

“I’ll bite.”

“The only blood found at the scene belonged to the
victims.”

“Makes sense,” Bobby said.

“Sure. If you weren’t there,” McClary said. “And Chief Donato was not there. But I hit the guy. You hit him too.”

“This is true.”

McClary threw up his arms in frustration. “But I can’t write that bullets bounced off this guy.”

“Maybe he wore a Kevlar vest,” Sam suggested.

McClary snapped his fingers. “Bulletproof vest. Good one. I can use that.”

“Happy to help.”

“But it’s not true,” McClary said, turning to Bobby. “Because I’m guessing guys with horns sprouting from their head don’t shop the Kevlar aisles.”

“Probably not,” Bobby said.

“So … those were real horns?” McClary asked. “Not some kind of appliances or implants, like those fake vampire teeth fetishists get anchored in their jaw?”

“You could write that in your report,” Bobby suggested. “Cover yourself.”

McClary plopped down on the sofa and sighed. “Yeah, if anyone else saw what we saw. But that doesn’t explain the other stuff.”

Bobby walked over to the man and sat in the armchair perpendicular to the sofa so he could address McClary on his level. “Comes a time, Sergeant, when you have to decide.”

“Decide what?”

“Live the comfortable lie,” Bobby said, “or face the hard truth.”

Twenty-Two

Sumiko stood in front of Ryan’s house for five minutes, trying to decide if she wanted to walk up to the door or go back home. After a night to sleep on their argument, she tried to decide if she’d been fair to him and, conversely, if he’d been fair to her. If she was honest with herself, she had to admit she had been a bit self-absorbed about the blog. All the crazy stuff happening in town fed into her need to post updates, to try to find a connection that might explain all the oddities. She’d graduated from posting current events at school—tongue-in-cheek investigative reports about the mystery meat in the school cafeteria, and speculation about the identity of the perpetrators of various school pranks—along with hearty helpings of libidinous gossip, to writing posts about people dying in horrifying accidents and outbreaks of deadly diseases. At some point, the information
flow had overwhelmed her.

Now that her emotions were at a low boil, instead of seething, she tried to see things from Ryan’s point of view. She had been a girlfriend consumed by information and events that had little relevance to her blog’s professed subject matter or to them as high school students. Maybe she hadn’t made enough time for him. Setting aside her own interests for a moment, she knew he worried about his grades and about his future, and that he had little support from an absentee father. That was something they had in common. Ryan would need scholarship help and a boatload of loans to have a shot at college, any college. He probably had more stress in his life at the moment than he could handle. So, maybe he needed to talk to someone, and she had been the only person willing to listen—except she was too busy rattling on about all the weird stuff she was documenting on her blog.

She took a deep breath.

Okay,
she admitted.
I was kind of a jerk. But,
she reminded herself,
he crossed a line by destroying my property.

Was the destruction intentional? He had grown several inches in the last year, and sometimes he was ungainly, to say the least. She hadn’t really given him time to explain.

We were both wrong,
she concluded.

With a sigh, she walked up to his door and knocked.

Ryan opened the door, wearing an old blue hoodie pulled over his head, and quickly stuffed his hands in the pockets. He seemed a bit twitchy, his eyes looking as if he’d seen a ghost. If she didn’t known him so well, she might assume he
was using illegal drugs.

“Sumiko?”

“Ryan,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Yes—I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “I’m not sure what ‘okay’ means anymore.”

“This is hard for me,” she said, looking down at her feet for a second, “but I want to apologize. Not for yelling at you when you broke my monitor. You totally deserved that. I want to apologize for not listening to you—”

“I’ll pay for the monitor,” Ryan said. “It was my fault.”

“Thanks. I’m using my old CRT for now. So, no rush on paying me back. I’ll see if I can have it repaired. It’ll be cheaper than buying a new one. Maybe.”

“Okay,” Ryan said absently. “Send me the bill.”

“Ryan,” Sumiko said, “what’s wrong? You seem … odd.”

“Look, I gotta go.”

“Where?”

“You were right about us breaking up,” Ryan said. “You’re busy and I … I need some time alone, you know? You should stay away from me. Seriously.”

“Ryan, are you blowing me off?”

“It’s a bad time,” Ryan said, looking past her. “That’s all.”

“You’re breaking up with me?”

“It’s inevitable, right?” he said. “You’ve got your pick of colleges. You’ll be gone, new worlds to conquer, and I’ll be here. It was just a high school fling, right?”

“Ryan, that’s not how I see us.”

“Maybe you should face reality, Sumiko,” Ryan said. “This has to end. No sense prolonging the pain. Just … rip off the Band-Aid, right?”

“It was a stupid fight, Ryan,” she pleaded. “Couples have fights all the time. They get over it. Why are you acting this way?”

“It’s a bad time, Miko,” he said, reaching for the door. “I’ve gotta go.”

As she stood on the doorstep, her jaw practically unhinged in surprise, he stepped back and closed the door in her face. For a few moments, she stared at the door in disbelief. Waiting. But he left her standing there, dumbfounded. Obviously something was wrong with him, the way he huddled inside the hoodie, his lack of eye contact, his twitchiness. An idea began to form, that Ryan had somehow become part of the craziness infecting the town. Yes, the bomb scare was a hoax, but that didn’t mean Ryan’s weird behavior wasn’t part of the general madness.

Finally, she turned and walked away, in the general direction of her home. “What the hell was that?” she asked herself aloud.

At that moment, she had no idea, but she was determined to find out.