Bone Key (23 page)

Since Dean shot Azazel with the Colt, there hadn’t been any sign of those psychic abilities. For the first time, Sam came close to regretting that. Not that he particularly wanted those demonic abilities to return, but he didn’t want most of the human race to be wiped out, either.

The sun was no longer shining directly on the tarp, which meant that Sam was running out of time. He hoped that Dean was working an angle of his own. Hell, he hoped that Dean was still alive. He’d had all night to think about it, and it was perfectly possible that Dean wasn’t included because the Last Calusa only needed a specific number of white lives to sacrifice, and since Dean was the

“extra,” the Last Calusa just killed him.
Hope that’s not true, but I have to proceed as if
it is.
So he kept trying to move his whole hand. Dean drove as fast as he could on South Street the two blocks to the construction site. He wanted to have the Impala as close to ground zero as possible. But the demon insisted on riding in the back. Bone

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Dean wanted to make her walk the two blocks, but she insisted. “What, you’re willing to do a deal with me, but not willing to let me sit in your pwecious widdle car?” she had asked.

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Dean,” Bobby had said.

“Fine, whatever.”

He practically jumped out of the car as he parked it just outside the wards and threw open the back door. Jerking his thumb, he said, “Out!”

“Yes, Daddy,” the demon said in a pouty tone. Dean practically snarled. Kat was exactly the kind of girl Dean would be all over if he met her in a Duval Street bar, but knowing that “Fedra” was in there made him want to whip out the Colt and take a shot.

Speaking of which, he pulled it out of his waistband and handed it to Bobby. Bobby took it with a nod, then said, “I take it the empty street’s your doing, little lady?”

“Good guess,” the demon said with a sweet smile. “Can’t really do my best work with that big an audience, y’know? And before you both get your panties in a bunch, I just made them forget that anything was happening here and leave the site. It’s a temporary thing—by morning, they’ll be back to normal. But by then, one way or another, it won’t matter.”

“My panties weren’t in a bunch, thanks,” Dean 236 SUPERNATURAL

said, pulling out the bag of dust Bobby had given him. He pulled out a deep handful and tossed it forward on the street. It hovered in midair in a splatter pattern, as if he’d tossed against a sticky brick wall.

“Neither were mine.” The demon’s smile turned wicked. “But then, this young woman isn’t wearing any.”

Dean closed his eyes, took a breath, quickly banished the mental image, then looked around again. “The wards moved. When I crashed into them last night, they were about even with that fire hydrant.” Dean pointed at the hydrant in question, which was now behind where the dust had collected.

“Prob’ly from our cop and military buddies. They ain’t happy ’less they’re shootin’ at somethin’,”

Bobby said, “and the wards must be designed to expand at any sign of serious resistance.”

The demon rolled Kat’s eyes. “Brilliant deduction, Watson. Some of us already knew that. Can we get on with this, please? It’s already ten after five, and we have a lot of prep work to do. Singer, would you be
ever
so kind as to draw a pentagram on the pavement? And make sure it’s pointing the
right
way.”

“You mean the wrong way, don’tcha?” Bobby asked with a snide smile.

“Bite me, Redneck Boy, you want this to work or not? Demonic magic means reverse pentagram.”

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“Yeah, yeah.” Bobby took a stick of chalk out of his pocket and started drawing.

“You need me to do anything?” Dean asked. The demon pulled a knife out of her pocket and held it with her left hand. “Just stand there and look cute.” Then she sliced open her right palm with the blade.

It happened so fast, Dean barely registered that it had happened when it was all over. He lunged forward and grabbed her left wrist. “What the hell’re you—?”

“Will
you take a chill pill already?”

She reached up and ran her palm down Dean’s chin. He felt the slickness of Kat’s blood and instinctively moved to wipe it off. Breaking Dean’s grip with appalling ease, the demon then grabbed
his
wrist. “The blood binds us together for the spell. Let me say it again in closed-captioning for the hearing-impaired—do you want this to work or not?”

“I ain’t gonna let you harm that girl.”

Kat’s face grew hard, and her eyes went black.

“Grow up, Dean. You wanna make an omelette, some eggs are gonna get cracked. I need this meat puppet alive to do this anyhow, and all I sliced open was her palm—not the veins in the wrist or the carotid or the femoral. So get over your big self and
let me do this.
”

Through gritted teeth, Dean said, “Fine.”

238 SUPERNATURAL

“Good.” The demon smiled, her eyes going back to their usual blue, and wiped her palm on Dean’s other cheek.

Feeling fully soiled, Dean asked, “Now what?”

“Prepare yourself. The spirits of a lot of very unhappy dead people are going to get slammed into your consciousness all at once. You’ve got to stay focused. Pick something—a happy memory, a thought, a song you like, a pretty girl you banged, whatever—and focus on that to the exclusion of all else. That should ground you. I need you aware, which means you’ve got to beat down the other voices that are gonna be in your head.” The demon moved closer to him. Dean could smell the chlorine from the pool that Kat had apparently used within the last few hours. “You sure you’re up for this?”

“Wouldn’t have said yes if I wasn’t, bitch. Get on with it.”

She chuckled. “That’s my boy.”

“Not hardly.”

Bobby stood upright. “Pentagram’s done.”

The demon looked down at the pavement.

“Wow.”

“What?” Bobby asked, sounding confused.

“I’ve never seen a freehand pentagram drawn so neatly.”

Dean blew out a laugh.
Typical Bobby.
The demon then closed Kat’s eyes and started Bone

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breathing more slowly. She folded her legs under her in a lotus position. Belatedly, Dean realized that she hadn’t lowered herself to the street but picked her legs up off the ground and was now floating over the reverse pentagram. She opened her eyes, and they’d gone all black again.

Bobby stood to the side and hefted the Colt.

“Don’t think my incredibly neat freehand pentagram’s gonna protect you from this, little lady.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Bobby-boy. Look, we don’t trust each other. I get that. We’ll do this, wipe out the Last Calusa, save humanity, avenge Alberto, then I’ll go back to being the Legion of Doom to your Super Friends, ’k?”

“Sounds good to me.” Dean then turned his back on the demon and Bobby, and closed his eyes, slowing his breathing down. Dad had sent Dean to a martial-arts school when he was a kid, but he’d never taken to it. It didn’t help that they moved around so much that he kept having to start over as a beginner at every new dojo, but Dean also wasn’t very good at the whole discipline thing. He was more of a brawler.

So Dad had trained Dean himself, teaching his son what the Marines had taught him. But there were a few elements of Asian martial arts that had been part of that, and one was controlling your breathing. Dean put his hands out straight in front 240 SUPERNATURAL

of him, pulled them in toward his chest as he inhaled for six heartbeats, held his breath for three heartbeats, then lowered his hands toward his hips while exhaling for six more heartbeats. He repeated this a few more times, while taking the demon’s advice about finding something to focus on. But it wasn’t a happy memory (not enough of those), a song he liked (though he briefly considered “Kashmir”), or a sexual encounter (too many of those).

No, he focused on the one thing that he knew would keep him grounded the way the demon said he’d need to be.

“Take your brother outside as fast as you can—

don’t look back. Now, Dean,
go
!”

Sam’s not dying. Not on my watch. You protect
your family no matter what.

I’m coming for you, Sammy. Just hold tight.
And don’t look back.

He opened his eyes. Behind him, he could hear Kat’s voice muttering an incantation in a language he didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Latin, certainly. Since it
was
demon magic, it was probably some language that was even more dead than Latin. The chanting stopped.

Dean screamed.

EIGHTEEN

. . . he had been saying “today is the day” for years now. Hunting for treasure under the reef-laden seas of south Florida had been a passion of his and his family’s since the 1950s. But when he learned of the
Nuestra Señora de Atocha
in 1968—a Spanish sailing vessel that was written up as one of the richest shipwrecks ever lost—finding it became his life’s work. It had been lost in the Florida Keys, specifically near Key West.

He and his wife and children all moved to Key West, and they continued to seek the great treasure. The search for the Mother Lode had literally taken decades, and claimed the life of his oldest son.

But still they soldiered on. Still he insisted

“today is the day.” Financed by his years of running a dive shop, by investors who wanted a piece of the Mother Lode, and people who were willing 242 SUPERNATURAL

to work for almost nothing, he kept searching, kept hoping, never once giving up.

They mocked him, they said he was a moneygrubbing treasure hunter, they said he was a charlatan, they said he was a con man. But, this being Key West, mostly they just left him alone. Everyone knew about the crazy old treasure hunter and his equally crazy family. And who knew?

Maybe someday he’d find it. Maybe someday, today really
would
be the day. And then today finally came on this hot July day in 1985. It had been his youngest son, Kane, who’d found it, radioing back to Key West while he was buying new diving fins.

They’d found the Mother Lode. Over a thousand silver bars, and boxes of coins with three thousand coins in each.

Now he walked down the streets of Key West, being congratulated by total strangers on the street—who all knew him, of course, he was a Key West institution by now, never mind that most people thought him nuts—and he swelled with pride. He’d known all along that he would find the treasure.

He gave silent thanks to Dirk, tragically lost almost exactly a decade before.
I’m sorry you
didn’t get to see this, son.

A tall young man with shaggy hair and hazel Bone

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eyes walked up to him and shook his hand enthusiastically. “This is a great day, isn’t it?”

Sam . . .

. . .
she couldn’t take it anymore. Everything had gone downhill since they left Key Largo. She had loved it down there, but Dad got a new job, and Mom insisted that they had to move to Chattanooga, even though it was the middle of the school year, and all her friends were
here.
The road trips down to Key West or up to Miami, the trips in Ellie’s father’s boat, volunteering to help out at the birding and wildlife festival on Marathon Key, and so much more. She had fought Mom and Dad every step of the way, throwing tantrums and crying and saying that there was no way this could possibly work.

“I’ll be miserable!” “It’ll suck!” “Everyone there’ll hate me!” That last was heartfelt, as she recalled the way everyone treated kids who transferred in midsemester: They were just
tortured.
But nobody listened to her. Nobody ever did. So off they all went to Chattanooga, and sure enough, all the kids tormented her. “Noob!” “Ain’t in Florida no more!” “Why don’t you come to our hangout? You mean you don’t
know
where it is? Why not?”

Then she made the mistake of trying to fit in by 244 SUPERNATURAL

getting drunk with the cool kids. Except the cool kids had roofies.

No one believed the rape story. It didn’t help that she could barely remember what happened, only vague recollections of several boys pulling down their pants and a constant ache between her legs that had yet to go away.

Mom wanted to press charges, but Dad insisted that she was asking for it.

Luckily, Mom kept plenty of pills in the medicine cabinet. She wasn’t sure what all the prescriptions were for—and Mom had probably lost track herself, there were so
many
of them—so each bottle got upended onto the coffee table.

The last thing she saw as the room got all fuzzy after downing all the pills was Dad—

Except Dad didn’t look like Dad, he was too young. And Dad was bald, so why’d he have a full head of hair? And his eyes were the wrong color . . .

Sam . . .

. . .
he couldn’t believe it. A
doll.
Of all the places to entrap him, they chose a
doll.
It was just ridiculous papal propaganda. They kept calling what he did “satanic,” but Satan had nothing to do with it. After all, God created all things, did He not? If so, that meant that the spells that he cast were also from God, not from Lucifer. Bone