Bone Key (24 page)

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But the priests and the cardinals insisted, and he was condemned. Never mind what he had learned about Monsignor Theodore. He was just a heretic and a worshipper of the black arts, no one would believe
him
when he said that the monsignor had children by four different young women of the parish. Did no one notice how many women gave birth to red-haired children, despite their husbands’

being off fighting Prime Minister Aberdeen’s war in the Crimean Peninsula?

No, instead he was condemned to be burned at the stake. Knowing he’d be denied heaven, he had been surprised to find his spirit descending, not into hell, but into a doll made by a Bahamian housekeeper of the monsignor’s.
It seems I wasn’t
the only one practicing the dark arts.
Trapped in the
thing
of cloth and straw, he went to the Bahamas, then to the Americas, eventually finding himself in the thrall of a small child. By then it had been several decades, and he was going mad.

After the boy grew up and eventually went mad himself and died—and he was very proud of the role he played in the former—he was left inside the little room that the boy had had made for him. People would come and gape and point and be amused at the little room with the little furniture. Today, one group of people walked in, led by a tall young man with hazel eyes and a mop of hair. 246 SUPERNATURAL

“And this is Raymond.”

Sam . . .

. . .
he lay awake in his bedroom in the White House, staring at the ceiling. The rhythm of his wife Bess sleeping beside him was all he could hear.

This was the only time he ever allowed himself to have doubts, here in the privacy of his bedroom, with only a sleeping Bess for company.
Did I do the right thing?

When the reporters asked him about bombing Hiroshima, he was adamant that it was the correct order to give. Back when he was an artillery officer, they used to call the Great War “the war to end all wars,” and this latest conflict had proven that to be dead wrong. It had dragged on for years now, and it had to end. The Germans had surrendered in May, and it was long past time that the Japanese—who had brought the U.S.
into
this war in the first place by bombing American soil—did likewise. Their boys—
his
boys—were dying, and it needed to stop.

His mantra had always been “don’t ever apologize for anything,” and he never
would
apologize for what he had ordered. Not to the people of Japan, who had bombed Pearl Harbor, and not to the American people, who were made safer by his actions.

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But here, now, alone in the dark, he wondered if what he had done was the right thing.
Stop being an ass
, he admonished himself.
You’re
the commander in chief. The buck stops here, and
you did right.

Quietly, he climbed out of bed and walked to the door. He’d get one of the men outside to bring him a glass of warm milk, and he’d get some shuteye. Opening the door, he saw a very tall young man with far too much hair and hazel eyes. “Can I help you, sir?” he asked politely.

Sam . . .

. . .
he stood over Agnes’s deathbed, wondering what he would do with himself now.

The whole point of everything had been so he could retire, sell the boat, and spend his waning years with Agnes in their beautiful house. However, the consumption didn’t seem to care about his plans.

It had all happened so
fast.
One moment Agnes was in the sitting room, writing a letter to their son, while he sat on the front porch reading the newspaper and watching the carriages go by the cobblestone road in front of the house. Then she said she felt poorly and went upstairs to the bedroom to lie down. But she could not get to sleep for all the coughing.

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When she started to cough up blood, he had summoned a physician.

Unfortunately, all the doctor could do was tell him what he suspected from the moment she started coughing blood: She had the consumption, and there was nothing to be done.

Now she lay dead in their bedroom, and he was alone. The house had been the perfect size when he had it built with his earnings on the wrecker, perfect for raising a family. Even when the children had grown up and moved away to start their own families, the house was always filled with just the two of them, plus whatever friends or family might visit.

Now, though, the house was empty.

He didn’t know what to do.

“Excuse me, Captain?” said the voice of the man from the mortuary.

Turning around, he saw a tall young man with dark hair and hazel eyes. “Yes?”

“We’re ready to take your wife.”

Sam . . .

. . .
he stood watching the munitions factory burn, the acrid smell burning his nostrils. He ran toward the building, looking for survivors to take back to his ambulance. He’d only just arrived in Milan, having volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross.

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Paris had been bad enough, with Jerry’s shells blasting all around them as he and his friends tried to sightsee, but then
this
. . . He ran toward the fire, finding only the dead. When he saw the corpse of a girl, it brought him up short.

War was men’s work. There shouldn’t have been girls here. Young men died in war, he knew that. Only eighteen years of age, he had volunteered as an ambulance driver—despite the fool at the Red Cross who insisted that he needed spectacles—in order to help both the living and the dead who fought in this Great War. Those who were wounded needed help, and those who died deserved proper burials, not having their corpses left on a battlefield.

Getting to his knees, he got the girl’s body away from the fire. She was dead, but that was no reason to desecrate her further.

He was directed to an improvised mortuary that had been hastily assembled near the burned-out remains of the factory. No matter how many bodies he and the others brought back, it always seemed there were more, men and girls alike. Then he ran back and found a familiar-looking young man in a soldier’s uniform. He had unusually shaggy brown hair under his helmet and hazel eyes that stared blankly at the smoky sky.
Sam . . .

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* * *

. . .
he loved flirting with the tourists of both sexes when they came into the shop. Even after he was diagnosed with HIV, and even after he started losing weight and the crap broke out on his skin, he stayed on the job, selling silly T-shirts and sillier souvenirs to the tourists on Duval Street. Marty said he could keep working as long as he could stand upright. Based on the way he’d been coughing his lungs out, it wouldn’t be for much longer. But he was determined to make the most of it. One tall drink of water came sauntering in, with shaggy brown hair and just to
die
for hazel eyes, and he came right up to him. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for a T-shirt for my brother.”

Sam . . .

. . .
he only felt alive when he was writing. Sitting at the kitchen table in the tiny cottage he rented, the fountain pen his aunt had given him in his hand, the notebook in front of him, and the verses just
flowing.

He’d only gotten a few of his poems published, and it hardly paid the bills, but he didn’t care, as long as he could write. All day, he would do his work as a janitor at the courthouse, but at night, he wrote his poems, and he was
alive.
There was a knock at the door. “Hey, it’s me. Got a package for ya.”

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He got up to open the door and saw the UPS

guy. But he had shaggier hair, and was taller.
Sam . . .

. . .
she loved the crowds more than anything. Sure, sometimes they didn’t tip well, and sometimes they forgot to applaud, and sometimes they were downright rude, and sometimes they requested “Free Bird” for the eight millionth time, but overall, playing guitar in the Bull was just a great experience.

Tonight, though, was pretty dead. She plucked away at her Takamine acoustic that had gone with her to every gig. After finishing playing “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard” for the couple at the front table, she noticed that somebody else had come in, sitting at the bar: a tall guy, hunched over a lite beer.

She asked, “Any requests?”

“You know ‘Brown-Eyed Girl,’ lady?”

Sam . . .

They kept coming
at
him. Dean thought he would lose himself in the dead.

Mel Fisher, the famous treasure-seeker. Althea McNamara, a teenager who committed suicide after being gang-raped. Raymond, the doll who’d attacked them at Cayo Hueso, who turned out to be possessed by a nineteenth-century sor-252 SUPERNATURAL

cerer named Caleb Dashwood. President Harry S

Truman, after he dropped the A-bomb on Japan. Ernest Hemingway, when he volunteered for the Red Cross in World War I. José Sandoval, a gay store worker who died of AIDS. Jonathan Gomez, a poet. Bonnie Bowers, a Duval Street musician who died in a diving accident.

And so many more . . .

But Dean focused on Sam. No matter what, he had to save Sam, and that enabled Dean to get the dead under control.

When he did so, Dean felt it.

It was a rush like nothing he’d ever experienced. Better than the highest high, a bigger thrill than anything Dean could imagine. The entire world was at his fingertips. Even though the spirits were remnants of the dead, what Dean took from them was their joys, their hopes, their dreams, their doubts, their confusion, their grief, their anguish, their love, their hate, their
lives.
All of it coursing through Dean.

He thought he’d felt alive before, but he was ohso-wrong. While their lives were pretty miserable much of the time, Dean still got a rush from the hunt, from the destruction of evil, from the saving of lives. But that rush suddenly paled in comparison. It was like he had been color-blind his whole life, and suddenly could see every hue in a prism. He didn’t just see the street, the construction site, Bone

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the sky, the ocean—he saw
everything.
The electric currents running through power lines. Radio waves moving through the air. Ley lines coursing through the earth.

The first thing he did was project this new power onto the wards the Last Calusa had put up, shattering them with a flash of light. Unsurprisingly, that got the Last Calusa’s attention. The spirit appeared before Dean.

“Hey, Tonto,” Dean said with a wicked grin.

“You impressed yet?”

NINETEEN

The Last Calusa remembered.

For many seasons, the Calusa were the mightiest warriors. The Last Calusa remembered that because it was the reason for their vengeance. It was their reason for being.

The outsiders came, and the Calusa rejected them. The worst were their priests—“missionaries,”

they called themselves—who tried to turn them to the way of their one god. They even went so far as to insist that the eye soul of their god’s only son and another eye soul of indeterminate origin were, along with their god, simply a different face of the Three Gods.

But the Calusa rejected their god. The Calusa thanked the Three Gods for what they granted. The outsiders simply begged their god for forgiveness for their transgressions. Worse, their god
granted
it, giving them free rein to commit more Bone

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transgressions, secure in the knowledge that their weak and feeble god would still accept them if they bent their knee to him.

Worse, the outsiders knew nothing of the spirit world. Oh, they claimed to believe in two different afterworlds of the dead, one for those who transgressed, one for those who did not, and they all hoped to get into the latter so their eye souls would not suffer.

When the Last Calusa began their task, they learned that the outsiders had won the day, and taken over the land that once was the exclusive purview of the Calusa. They knew even less of the spirit world than they had before.

The dark spirits tried to control the Last Calusa, to turn them to their foul ways, but the Last Calusa’s vengeance was too strong. One dark spirit was dead, killed by its own power turned back on it. Now the sun was about to disappear, and the Last Calusa would be able to wreak their vengeance. The outsiders would pay for what they did. Suddenly, the wards were shattered. The Last Calusa were briefly stunned by this, as none in this world of ignorance could possibly have the power to do that, and the dark spirit that the Last Calusa had not killed was too weakened by their own attack on it.

When the Last Calusa went to the source of the attack, they saw the dead soul. Brother to 256 SUPERNATURAL

one of the sacrifices, the Last Calusa saw that he was tainted by the dark spirits, who had already claimed his life for their own. The Last Calusa could not sacrifice him, so they left him. Now, though, the dead soul had changed. The eye souls of many flowed within him, and they all had the stink of the dark spirit.