Witch's Canyon (19 page)

Juliet bolted. She burst back inside, slammed the door behind her, and locked it again. Outside, she barely heard the crunch of the animal’s landing in the hard snow.

With the door secure, she rushed to the bathroom, certain that the vomit would come this time. All the way there, she thought,
Stupid, stupid, stupid! You
cannot go outside! To go outside is to . .
.

To go outside is to die.

TWENT Y-ONE

The deputy’s SUV was pulled off to the side of the road and its driver’s side door hung open. No lights burned inside or out. Someone said that the vehicle had run out of gas and then its battery died, but it only sat there for a couple of hours, so Sam thought the real explanation had to be more complicated than that.

They had heard about its discovery on their police band radio, shortly after returning to the motel following the eventful trip to Heather’s and back. By the time they made it to the scene, the deputy’s body had already been bagged and hauled away. Sam overheard another deputy talking about bugs, but that didn’t make any sense; he hadn’t seen so much as a housefl y since coming to town.

Yellow tape reading sheriff line do not cross in big black letters had been strung around the SUV

and off into the brush around it. Uniformed deputies Witch’s

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bustled around behind the tape, taking photographs and measurements. Others stood in grim little knots, talking among themselves in low voices under the gray light of an overcast morning. Nobody seemed to pay any attention to Sam and Dean until Sheriff Beckett detached himself from one of those clusters and stalked toward them. He didn’t look like a happy man.

“Who are you people?” he asked as he drew near them. “And don’t give me any crap about the
National Geographic
, because I only see you at crime scenes, and neither one of you is ever taking notes or pictures. I’ve just had a man killed who was a deputy and a friend of mine, and I’m not in any mood for foolishness, so either I get a straight answer out of you or we might just have ourselves a constitutional test case on unlawful arrest.”

“We’re not here to make any trouble,” Sam said.

“That’s not what I asked you.”

Dean dug a leather case from his pocket that Sam hadn’t seen him put there. “We’re trying to stay low profile,” he said, lowering his voice as if inviting Beckett into a conspiracy. He opened the case. Sam saw a flash of a badge and a plastic window showing an ID

card. “Homeland Security,” Dean said quietly.

Beckett took the badge case and studied its contents. “Nice job,” he said. “Looks like the real deal.

It’d convince me if I was feeling persuadable, which I’m not.” He eyed Sam with suspicion. “You got one, too? Or maybe you’re from the Department of Agri-culture.”

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“He’s not buying it,” Sam said to Dean.

“Doesn’t seem to be.”

“I say we tell him the truth.”

“Okay,” Dean said. “We’re with DEA,” he began.

“Deep undercover.”

The sheriff reached for his handcuffs.

“We’re here because of the murder cycle,” Sam said quickly. The sheriff stopped, hooked his thumb through his belt. “We investigate things like this.

Paranormal events, particularly the violent kind.

Folklore, myth, what some people would call monsters. I can’t give you verifiable statistics, but we have a very good track record at what we do. By now you’ve got to admit that there’s something going on here that’s outside the scope of your expertise.”

“So you two are some kind of ghostbusters?”

“Except they’re not real,” Sam said. “We are.” Sheriff Beckett ticked his eyes back and forth between them. “I don’t know which story is more ri-diculous.”

“So when you said tell him the truth,” Dean said quietly, “you meant the true truth.”

“That’s right,” Sam said. “He needs our help, and we could use his.”

“We really are here about the murders,” Dean said. “Every forty years, like clockwork. Unusual weapons. Even animal attacks. You have a better way to explain it?”

“Better than what?” Beckett asked. “I haven’t heard you explain it yet. You’ve only
described
it.”

“Well, truth is, we’re still working on that part.” Witch’s

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“I see,” Beckett said. “So all your expertise is good for what, exactly?”

“At least we’re not running around pretending it’s something you can solve by the book.”

“Son,” Beckett said, looking weary, “I haven’t been pretending I could solve any of this for about thirty hours now. Maybe a little longer. I’d like to be able to keep ahead of it, prevent some people from dying if I can. But solve it? Hell, I just want to keep the town together until it passes. Forty years from now it’ll be some other cop’s problem.”

“But we can make it stop forever,” Sam said.

“How are you going to do that?” Sam cleared his throat. “That’s the other thing we don’t know yet. Depends on what it is. We’ll get there, though. We really are good at this sort of thing.”

Beckett shook his head slowly. “I can hardly believe what I’m going to say. You think you can do something about all this? We’re supposed to have a shopping center opening at noon today. It’s—” He consulted his wristwatch. “It’s seven-ten now. You were there when Mayor Milner said that nothing would delay the opening.”

“But that many people all gathered together in one place might be an irresistible target for whatever’s behind all this,” Sam said.

“Exactly. If they can get here.” He inclined his head toward the SUV. “Apparently, we can’t get out.

That’s what Trace was trying to do, trying to get to Flagstaff to fetch us some reinforcements. We can’t 176 SUPERNATURAL

call or even e-mail outside of town. But if people can come in, then once they’re here they’ll be trapped too, and like you say, piled up in the mall, they’ll be easy pickings. So if you think you can do something to stop it, you have till eleven. When noon comes around, I’ll be at that mall. If I see you and you haven’t put a stop to all this, I’m holding you both as material witnesses. You have any outstanding war-rants?”

Sam and Dean caught each other’s glances, then looked away.

“I thought maybe,” Beckett continued. “Look, that’s five hours away. You’re the experts you claim to be, that should be plenty of time.”

“We’ll do what we can, Sheriff,” Sam said. “You have our word on that.”

“I hate to admit it, boys, but I’m counting on you.” Beckett was turning around to go back to his car when police radios crackled. After a moment’s conversation, one of the deputies called out to him.

“Sheriff! Jodi Riggins has spotted that old man, she thinks, heading east down Second!”

“On my way!” Beckett replied.

Sam caught him by the arm. “Let us go fi rst,” he said. “You said you’d trust us, so give us fi ve minutes. It’s just a sighting, right, no one’s been killed?

We think that old man might be the key to it, and if you go in with lights and siren, he’s going to vanish again.”

Beckett looked constipated, like he’d eaten his own Witch’s

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words and they disagreed with his gut. “Three minutes,” he said. “You get on out of here, and I’m three minutes behind you. You better move your asses.” They moved. Sam reached the Impala first, so he got in behind the wheel. Dean slid in beside him without comment, and before his door was closed Sam was peeling out.

On the way, Dean slid his nickel-plated .45 from the glove and checked the magazine.

“What are you doing?” Sam asked.

“Making sure I’m loaded.” He reached into the backseat, brought up a pump-action Remington from the fl oorboards. “For anything.”

“We probably just want to talk to this guy,” Sam said. “Not kill him.”

“We don’t know that. All we know, he might be the soldier. Or the Indian. Or both.”

“Yeah, and we’ll know that if we see him.”

“When.”

“When we see him. But if he’s none of those things, he might be a witness. He might know something.

He might even be a hunter.”

“He doesn’t sound like a hunter,” Dean said.

“Only because so few of them live to be old. But showing up around the scenes of these incidents?

That sounds like a hunter to me, and a better one than we are, so far.”

“Okay, you could be right, Sam. We won’t shoot on sight.”

The car cornered well considering the roads had frozen over during the night and were just beginning 178 SUPERNATURAL

to thaw, and within Sheriff Beckett’s three-minute window they were cruising down Second Street. A mailbox on the right had riggins painted on the side.

“Okay, along here somewhere,” Dean said.

Sam slowed. He watched the houses and yards on the left while Dean took the right.

They had covered two blocks when Dean shouted,

“There!”

Sam screeched to a stop. “Where?” Dean pointed to a gap between a single-story bun-galow and a larger, shingled A-frame that looked like it had been built during the seventies. “I saw him right in there, going behind that wannabe ski lodge. Old guy, carrying a rifle he must have had since birth. I think there was a knife or hatchet or something tucked in his belt, too, but I couldn’t get a very good look.”

“You go up behind him,” Sam said. “I’ll go around the other side. We’ll try to pinch him in the middle.

And don’t let him get us caught in each other’s cross fire if we need to shoot.”

“I thought you didn’t want to shoot him.”

“I don’t. I’m just saying . . . if we have to.”

“No cross fire,” Dean repeated. He got out of the car and started jogging toward the A-frame. Sam sprinted past it, then hooked around toward the back.

Behind the A-frame the woods grew thick again.

At first Sam didn’t see anyone except Dean in the yard.
Lost him again
, he thought, disappointment Witch’s

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welling up in him. But then Dean gave a shout and pointed, and Sam saw the old man trying to sneak off through the trees.

Both Winchesters started running, relying on long legs to propel them over short, prickly underbrush, dodging low-hanging branches as they went. The old man broke into a run too, but his legs weren’t as steady as theirs, and the length of his rifl e slowed him because he kept catching it in fi r branches.

Within a minute they had caught up to him, one on either side. He leveled the rifle at Dean’s belly. In the distance, Sam could hear approaching sirens.

“You take one more step, either of you jaspers, and I’ll open you up like a can of tuna,” the old man said.

From the glint in his narrow-slitted eyes, Sam believed he meant it.

Wanda Sheffield was disappointed to see that the snow had stopped during the night. She’d curled up under her down comforter the night before, hoping that when she opened her eyes again a blanket of white would cover the land, flocking all the trees and creating the winter wonderland effect that would help put her in the Christmas spirit.

Christmas was Wanda’s favorite time of year. She loved the music, the decorations, the general good cheer. She even liked shopping in crowded malls, as long as the stores were dressed for the holidays. She wore bright clothes, heavy on the reds and greens, and she seemed, on those occasions, to have a per-180 SUPERNATURAL

petual grin on her face, like some kind of happy idiot.

This year the mood hadn’t quite caught her up yet.

It would, she had no doubt of that. And it was early in the month yet.

Still, a good heavy snowfall would have set her nicely down the Christmas road.

She would survive the disappointment, she fi gured, one way or another. To that end, she brewed a small pot of fair trade organic French roast and put a couple of croissants she had picked up the day before in the oven to warm. She got some boysenberry jam from the refrigerator, along with a container of heavy cream. If one intended to pamper oneself, she had long believed, half measures weren’t worth the trouble. From a cabinet, she took a real china cup, the kind that came with a saucer and seemed so out of vogue these days, and she put a spoonful of sugar into the bottom of it.

Wanda didn’t like a lot of clutter around, so although she would decorate for the holidays, she hadn’t done so yet. She kept her home, a 1970s A-frame, neat and clean, and as she worked in the kitchen, she put used utensils and dishes into the sink and ran a little water over them. After sitting at a pine dining table and consuming her breakfast, she carried those dishes back to the sink, rinsed them, and put the whole lot in the dishwasher.

While she was straightening up after bending over the dishwasher, she thought a shadow passed across her back window.

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She closed the dishwasher’s stainless steel door and walked over to the window. It looked out onto a quarter acre of flat yard, then a thick expanse of trees. A few birds—the kind she called LGBs, for

“little gray birds,” because she didn’t know their real names—jumped and flitted about on yesterday’s snow, pecking through it for bugs or seeds or whatever it was they ate off the ground. Grass poked through the snow in tufts here and there, and one scraggly bush, its reedlike branches bent toward the ground by late fall’s snow and ice, offered shelter to a couple of the tiny birds.