Supernatural--Cold Fire (32 page)

Dean chose that moment to call and update him on what he and Sam had found under the old Larkin barn. The angel took in the information about Nodd being a serial killer and his daughter becoming the vengeful force known as a pontianak while dodging kitchen projectiles hurled with deadly force. Brianna had shifted her attention to the pantry and a plentiful row of canned goods.

Castiel heard Sam say the chilling words, “She’s here.”

And then the connection died.

Even if Castiel had his full Grace and could instantly appear next to the Winchesters, he would not have done so. The brothers could take care of themselves. He wasn’t so sure Malik, with a newborn in his care, would survive five more minutes with his homicidal sister. The angel was needed here, at this moment.

The closer he came to Brianna, the more desperately she flung cans at him. He dodged some, redirected others, and continued to close the gap. When her supply of canned goods was exhausted and she cast about for something heavier than cereal boxes filled with bran flakes or uncooked pasta shells to hurl at him, he caught her wrists in his hands.

“Stop this,” he said in his most commanding voice.

She screamed and kicked him in the shins.

He winced in pain just as she lunged forward, teeth bared to bite his face—

—and she fell limp, dangling by her wrists.

Wasting no time, he carried her to the nearest kitchen chair, sat her down and tied her hands behind her back. He cut another two sections of rope and tied her ankles to the crossbar between the chair legs. If the rope held she would awaken confused but sedate, enough time to convince her why she needed to be restrained before the unreasoning rage took hold again.

For now, Malik and Kiara were safe, but Castiel needed to check on the families of Melissa Barrows and Denise Atherton. Once they were safe, he could aid the Winchesters. And yet, he still wondered about Chloe and Olivia. If Sam and Dean stopped the pontianak, the women might recover, but how long could they and their unborn babies be left in a non-responsive state, with the mothers’ heart rates steadily dropping?

* * *

Assistant Chief Cordero dropped to one knee beside Melissa Barrows as she regained consciousness on the living room floor of her home. He helped her sit up, left hand supporting her back, while his right held his handcuffs. Melissa looked around the room, confused. Then her eyes located her mother lying on the sofa with a cold compress on her forehead.

“Mom? Are you okay? What happened?”

“I’ll be fine, dear,” Barbara Crane said.

“You’ve had an… episode,” Cordero said in a soothing tone to keep her calm long enough to restrain her.

“Episode? What’s going on?”

“I’d like to put these handcuffs on you before—”

“Handcuffs? Are you serious? You’re arresting me? Mom? Dad? What’s happening?”

“I’m not arresting you,” Cordero said. “This is strictly precau—”

Melissa’s eyelids fluttered.

“Look out!” Alan said. “That happens right before—”

Suddenly, Melissa punched Cordero in the mouth, splitting his lip.

Momentarily stunned, he almost fell over as she launched herself at him, trying to claw his face with her fingernails. “Bastard!” she screamed.

Fortunately, Cordero had spent years dealing with unruly suspects and angry drunks before getting promoted to glorified desk jockey at BHPD. With a deft move, he slipped a cuff over her left wrist, snapped it shut, and pulled her arm behind her back. She was practically hissing and spitting in anger as he locked the other ring around her right wrist, and she continued to kick. “Don’t make me use the Taser,” he said, hoping the threat would be sufficient deterrent.

“No!” Barbara said, horrified at the thought.

“You can’t reason with her,” Alan said. “Not when she’s like this.”

“Give me a hand,” Cordero said. Cordero carried leg irons in the trunk of his police cruiser, but had a simpler solution right in his belt: nylon cable ties. He couldn’t transport her with them, but he only needed to get her under control for now. He grabbed her flailing ankles and pinned them together with both hands. Then he had Alan wrap a long cable tie around them and zip it snug.

She twisted and strained against the metal and nylon restraints, but as long as he only saw the whites of her eyes, he had no other option. “Truly sorry about this, Mrs. Barrows,” he said, even though she couldn’t process the apology.

He called Captain Sands at the Atherton home. She and Gary Atherton had managed to restrain Denise in a similar fashion, although Jaime said she’d likely have one hell of a black eye courtesy of Mrs. Atherton.

“Holding an ice pack on my eye as we speak.”

“Split lip here,” Cordero said. “No ice yet.”

“So… What now?”

“Ice seems like a good idea.”

“I meant about these women?”

Cordero looked down at Melissa Barrows, straining and cursing every few seconds. This was beyond anything he’d ever encountered in his law enforcement career. Hell, it was beyond anything he’d ever heard about. He shook his head, realized she couldn’t see the gesture over the phone and said, “I don’t know, Jaime.” Then, because he was supposed to be the one with the answers, even when no answers appeared forthcoming, he added, “We’ll think of something.”

If he was a betting man, he’d put all his chips on the FBI agents finding a solution because, as much as he hated to admit it to himself, he doubted he’d ever know how to resolve a situation this bizarre.

Riza Nodd, murdered and reborn as a wrathful pontianak over fifty years ago, appeared beside her former shallow grave.

At the moment of her arrival, Sam felt a sudden chill and a brief displacement in the air as a sweet-smelling breeze washed over him. But he didn’t see her. Not at first.

His attention had been focused on Dean, on the far side of the military hospital bed speaking to Castiel. Before making that call, Dean had laid his machete at the foot of the bed, but he still held the flashlight in his left hand, which he had pressed to his left ear. As he talked and turned at random, the beam of light played about the interior of the underground workroom, splashing against the warped plywood walls, gleaming off the bed rails, exposing the ruin of the supply cabinet but without dipping low enough to highlight Calvin Nodd’s shattered ribs and ruined eye sockets.

As he swiveled to face the bed, Sam turned away from the bright beam and saw her standing there, less than three feet behind him, motionless as a rotting statue.

Caught off-guard by her sudden appearance, Sam froze as well. She gave the impression of coiled menace. Like a startled snake, she might strike at the slightest provocation. He was uncomfortably aware that he and Dean had invaded her lair. She might as well have posted a sign on the black door:
TRESPASSERS WILL BE DISEMBOWELED
.

Without looking her directly in the eyes—a surefire provocation—he examined her in that long moment before either one of them reacted to the presence of the other. With her head bowed, her long straggly black hair falling forward, her pale face was mostly hidden. Thin to the point of emaciation, she wore the tattered remnants of a black burial dress that left her dirt-smeared arms and most of her legs and bare feet exposed. Her narrow frame made her swollen abdomen appear even more pronounced—damning evidence of the child never born. But his gaze settled on her long fingers ending in thick, hooked claws with sharp points. Once he noticed them, the fingers twitched, as if she couldn’t wait to rip him open.

“Dean.”

“Just a second.”

Her head turned ever so slightly.

Sam followed the line of her gaze to—Calvin Nodd’s body.

Even through the stringy veil of her black hair, Sam saw her wicked smile at the sight of her dead father. Worse, the broad smile stretched wide to reveal a fearsome row of pointed teeth.

“Dean!” Sam called. With Riza about to attack, Sam needed to act fast and Dean had no idea all hell was about to break loose. “Riza.”

Finally, Dean looked up from his call. “What about R—?”

But now he could see for himself.

“She’s here.”

Dean shoved his phone in his pocket, his gaze darting to the machete he’d left at the foot of the bed, currently out of arm’s reach. And he, like Sam, must have had the sense that any sudden movement would trigger an attack.

“Avoid direct eye contact,” Sam said softly to Dean, reminding him of her trigger. Then Sam looked toward the pontianak, his eyes hooded a bit, focused on a spot beneath her chin, peripherally aware that she still stared at her father’s withered corpse. “He deserved it,” Sam said, addressing her directly. “For what he did to you and the others.”

A sound halfway between a groan and a sigh rose from her throat, which Sam interpreted as assent.

“But the others didn’t,” Sam continued. “The men you killed were innocent. You have to stop—now. Whatever you’re doing at the hospital, you’re killing mothers and unborn babies.”

The strangled growl that erupted from her throat was ripe with disagreement. She had no intention of stopping anything. The guttural sound was the only warning Sam had of her impending attack. All the ominous energy brimming beneath the surface of her inhuman exterior exploded in a sudden lunge, claws extended, fangs bared.

With practiced ease, Sam swung his shotgun in front of her and fired a rock salt round at close range—to no effect. If she’d been an angry spirit, the salt would have forced her to dissipate briefly, but her rebirth as a pontianak had repurposed her flesh and bones, and different rules applied. Nevertheless, Sam worked the slide to eject the spent shell casing and pump a fresh round in the chamber, firing again just to keep her at bay.

Dean whipped his Beretta semi-automatic handgun out from the back of his waistband and emptied the magazine into her, almost every round striking home. The bullets ripped into her decayed flesh, most passing through her body to gouge holes in the plywood walls behind her. But no blood flowed from the wounds, the damage strictly cosmetic. Obviously, the force animating her body had little if any need for flowing blood or functioning internal organs.

She tilted her head to the side, almost as if to ask,
Is that all you got?

With the slight motion, a clump of stringy hair shifted away from her dark, sunken eyes and Sam caught a brief glimpse of them—completely dark and inhuman—an instant before she lunged at him for the second time. Instead of shooting her with a harmless blast of rock salt, he held the shotgun up in both hands to block her vicious claws from gutting him. But the force of the blow staggered him, sending shockwaves down his arms.

She grabbed the shotgun in her long hands and hurled him against the broken cabinet. His body struck the front, lengthwise, and it fell on top of him, pinning him against Nodd’s desiccated corpse. Sam felt several of Nodd’s remaining ribs crack under the pressure.

Riza pounced on top of the cabinet, landing heavily despite her frail-looking form, and her added weight drove Sam further into Nodd’s corpse. With a loud crack, his sternum gave way, and the remaining ribs broke and crumbled in rapid succession. Sam’s weight squashed what was left of the corpse’s shriveled organs. Trapped between a reanimated corpse and a long-dead one, Sam turned his head to the side, trying to escape the overpowering stench of decay. But he had a more immediate concern.

Riza lashed out with her powerful claws, smashing her way through the back of the cabinet, ripping out whole sections of wood, to reach Sam’s flesh in the most direct way possible.

Trapped under the cabinet, Sam glimpsed Dean’s legs moving to the foot of the military hospital bed, no doubt to try his luck with the machete since bullets had failed to slow her down. As Dean rushed toward Sam’s position, the smashing over his head stopped. Riza had seen Dean’s approach. Sam heard the blade of the machete whistle through the air, punctuated by Dean’s grunt of effort. He was swinging for the fences, but the pontianak must have caught his forearm mid-strike. A moment later, the flashlight dropped to the floor as Dean’s feet abruptly rose from the ground, and this time Riza grunted with the effort of hurling Dean across the room. A thunderous impact followed, as if someone had set off a small bomb behind one of the plywood walls.

Dean’s body slumped to the wooden floor, pieces of rotted plywood scattered around his legs. As Dean groaned, the handle of the machete slipped from his hand, and his body, what little Sam could see of it from his restricted view, seemed to fall backward into the gap behind the shattered wall. Sam stared, helpless but hopeful. Unfortunately, Dean lay still, apparently unconscious.

A moment later, the destruction of the cabinet over his head resumed. After one powerful blow, Sam felt the cabinet shift above him. Wood cracked and split. The weight atop him seemed to ease. The cabinet had been split down the middle and, as Riza’s weight shifted, each side slid away from Sam’s pinned body.

Perched on the cabinet half to his left, Riza Nodd crouched above him, head leaning over the gap, her hair hanging down around her death-pale face and soulless black eyes. Her mouth opened wide, exposing rows of pointed teeth, and a wet hiss rose from the back of her throat. Saliva hung from her lower lip and chin in viscous strands. Raising her right forearm beside her face, she opened and closed her hand one finger at a time, either admiring her claws or savoring the moment before she disemboweled him.