Supernatural--Cold Fire (21 page)

“Yes,” Dean said. “It is.”

“Well, sir, if you don’t mind, I need to finish up here.”

“Thanks for your help, Arthur,” Dean said, shaking the man’s hand before he climbed back up on his riding mower.

The engine fired up as Dean hurried back to the Holcomb residence.

Exhausted, Melissa Barrows crept down the stairs and collapsed on the sofa beside her husband. “She’s asleep,” Melissa mumbled. “Finally.”

He appeared equally wiped out, slouched on the cushions, one arm thrown over his head, TV remote balanced on his thigh, feet crossed on the coffee table—even though she’d asked him more times than she could count to keep them on the floor. But this time she was too tired to argue. Pick your battles, her mother had advised her before she got married. Same rule applied to raising kids. Of course, for the longest time, Melissa and Kevin feared they’d never have any kids to raise one way or the other.

“Thank God,” Kevin sighed. “Hard to believe something so small has the energy to keep two grown adults up all night, night after night.”

“We should patent her internal fuel cells,” Melissa said, setting the baby monitor on the coffee table and adjusting the volume to the halfway mark. She imagined if she listened closely she could hear little Noelle breathing softly, but all she really heard was the blissful silence of a contented baby.

“You telling me we have a baby cyborg?” Kevin asked in mock surprise. “I specifically ordered the pure human model with a sixteen-hour sleep recharge cycle.”

Melissa snuggled against his chest. “But the cyborg model was a free upgrade,” she said. “And you know I can’t resist a bargain.”

For years they tried to get pregnant the old-fashioned way but had no luck. Rather than accept that a Barrows baby was not meant to be, they decided to get medical help, which led to fertility testing, which segued into several rounds of IVF at the Stanton Fertility Clinic before the stars finally aligned for them. Kevin once joked that the natural act of getting pregnant had taken on the complexity of a NASA mission, years in the making, followed by nine months until touchdown on Planet Newborn. And having Noelle presented a whole new world for them. But it was a world they were eager to explore for the rest of their lives.

“Okay, then,” Kevin said. “I guess we’ll keep her.”

“That’s good,” Melissa said, starting to slur her words. “Because I accidentally threw away the receipt with her box.”

“Jeez, now you’re telling me she was delivered in a box by a truck,” Kevin said. “Here I thought we ordered blanket and stork air mail shipping.”

“Two-day box shipping was free,” she mumbled. “And you know I can’t resist…”

“You can’t sleep yet!”

“Watch me.”

“Thought we were finally going to binge-watch
Battlestar Galactica
.”

“Binge-watching the back of my eyelids right now,” Melissa said around a jaw-cracking yawn. “Fascinating stuff. You should try…”

“Shame to waste quiet-baby-time sleeping.”

“You had… other ideas?”

“Besides
BSG
?” Kevin asked. “Maybe one or two.”

“Such as…?” she asked, managing to raise an eyebrow high enough to show her interest was piqued without convincing him she had the requisite enthusiasm to follow through.

“Never mind,” Kevin said. “Mind is willing, but the body is weak. Or is it the other way around? Maybe both.”

“We may already be asleep and dreaming this conversation.”

“Are you dreaming about me? Or am I dreaming about you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Definitely.”

The baby monitor squawked with a startled baby cry.

Melissa’s eyes fluttered open, her head turned toward the speaker on the monitor, waiting.

Kevin tensed, hoping she’d calm herself and settle back into peaceful sleep, but ready for the wailing to commence. His turn to check on her if she woke. And at the moment, he felt like his body was glued to the sofa cushions.

“Should have sprung for the video monitor,” Melissa mumbled.

“You’d watch her 24/7,” Kevin said. “Big Mother.”

“Maybe you should rephrase that.”

“Oh, sorry,” Kevin said, chuckling. “You know what I meant.”

“Whatever. Don’t like it.”

Another baby cry, but this time it cut off abruptly.

“Kevin?”

“Yeah, I’m on it,” Kevin said, suddenly invigorated with nervous energy. Perhaps they were overprotective—some of their friends thought so, especially those with multiple kids—but Noelle was their first child and they had gone through so much to bring her into their lives that any concern became a major concern. Neither one of them had to say the words out loud to know what the other was thinking: sudden infant death syndrome.

Kevin took the stairs two at a time, already regretting he’d only read about CPR and hadn’t taken any classes. He’d always assumed he’d get around to it in his spare time, but now Noelle was here and he had a gap in life-saving knowledge. Probably too many to count. He wondered fleetingly if somebody published a baby survival guide he could purchase and study until he’d memorized every page. What to do in any infant emergency, indexed from A to Z. Melissa and he could grill each other with flashcards until every tip, trick and procedure was etched indelibly into their gray matter.

As expected, Melissa had closed the door to the nursery to prevent any minor sounds from disturbing the baby’s seemingly infrequent sleep. Kevin had oiled the hinges to eliminate metallic creaking whenever they checked in on Noelle. On the chance she’d fallen asleep again, he turned the knob and opened the door slowly, intending to peek inside the room before entering. If she was awake but quiet, he didn’t want her to see him and cry for him to come get her. He’d carefully slip back out unobserved.

Leaning through a ten-inch gap in the doorway, he never could have been prepared for what he saw. Instead of Noelle lying peacefully in her crib under the cartoon animal mobile, he saw only the hunched form of a pale woman with straggly black hair bent over the crib. She completely blocked his view of Noelle, which was probably why he next noticed a weird, pulsing appendage snaking from the nape of the woman’s neck, over her shoulder and down out of view.

He threw the door open and charged into the room. As the woman shifted, half-turning to face him, he saw what he had feared. The glistening and pulsing appendage stretched into the crib and had clamped onto the back of his daughter’s neck. Noelle’s eyes were closed, her body limp and her lips slack.

“Get away from her, you freaky bitch!” he shouted.

“Kevin?” his wife called in alarm from below.

Fearing that his daughter was ill or had trouble breathing, he’d never thought to bring a weapon to the nursery. Not that he kept guns or hunting knives in the house, but he could have taken a knife from the kitchen or the old baseball bat from the downstairs closet. He hadn’t even brought a cell phone to call the police. But none of that stopped him from rushing the intruder whose strange body mutation was harming his daughter.

Tangles of dark hair fell like a fetid veil in front of the strange woman’s face so that he only glimpsed her feral eyes in their dark, sunken sockets. But as soon as he rushed toward her, the snake-like appendage released his daughter and retracted into the back of the woman’s neck, leaving only a slimy, puckered orifice as evidence of its existence.

Kevin grabbed the woman’s shoulders—covered in rank, tattered clothing—intending to pull her away from the crib, shove her into the hall, down the steps and out the front door, in one enraged motion if he could manage it. He’d worry about how she’d gotten into their house later. Right now, his priority was kicking her the hell out.

“Get out!” Kevin yelled at the woman as he pulled her away from the crib.

Her body had seemed frail, almost sickly, with a hunched posture and an enlarged abdomen, but the amount of force required to move her just a few inches surprised him. Before he could adjust his grip and try again, her hands, weirdly long—and clawed!—dug into his chest and shoved him backward, hurling him into the far wall.

He fell on all fours, stunned by the ferocity of her attack and the force of the impact. As he struggled to rise, the strange woman glided forward, an eerie inhuman movement whereby the minimal shifting of her legs belied how far and how fast she had come. With her left hand she grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, hoisted him off the floor and flung him into the corner. Another awkward spill, but this time blood flowed from gashes under his throat, where her claws had slashed his flesh.

Blood dripping down his shirt and staining the beige carpet, he scrambled to an upright position, unsteady on his feet.

She came for him a third time.

He sidestepped, stumbling away from her—but not fast enough—and grabbed the windowsill for support.

Once again, she clutched his throat in her left hand.

“Call the—!” he gasped. “Call the police!”

But this time, she didn’t toss him aside. She held him still as her right hand ripped into his abdomen, pushing through the momentary resistance of skin and muscle to bore deep into his gut. As her arm burrowed deeper, her claws ripping and pulling, her unkempt hair shifted across her face, exposing her dark, sunken eyes. And they reminded him of a shark’s eyes, black and merciless and almost alien.

A moment later she noticed him staring in horror at her face and eyes and she shrieked in rage, releasing the hand that had clutched his throat. But her grip had been the only thing supporting his weight. His legs felt numb and lifeless.

Her clawed left hand darted toward his face, toward his own eyes.

In a frozen moment, he saw Noelle, fully awake and staring in his direction, crying—how long had she been crying?—at the top of her lungs. And he realized his daughter was watching him die—watching his brutal murder. And after he was gone, the clawed woman with the snake-like mutation in her neck would return to his baby to finish whatever the hell she had started. Melissa couldn’t stop her. The police would never arrive in time.

Then that moment shattered and he got to his feet, grabbed the demonic woman’s arms and hurled himself and her—using her own force against her as she reached for his eyes—backward against the bedroom window. Their combined weight broke the glass and he continued to clutch the intruder against him in a literal death grip until gravity came to his rescue and they both tumbled from the second-story room toward the unforgiving sidewalk below.

Kevin had already begun to feel his hold on consciousness slipping before plunging out the window. The fading of the light had finally blunted the searing pain coursing through his midsection. All he’d needed was a last burst of adrenaline after seeing Noelle helpless in her crib to give him the strength to save her from imminent danger.

Grimacing as he plummeted to the ground, locked in a fatal embrace with the hideous woman, he strained to speak one final thought. He tried to say,
Taking you with me, bitch!
Instead, in a harsh whisper filled with pain, he managed to utter a single word before the back of his skull split open on the sidewalk. “…you…”

Once again he was too late. As he spoke, the woman vanished. And his hands clutched only air.

Lying on the sidewalk in a spreading pool of his own blood, he welcomed the numbing tide of darkness that lapped over him and pulled him under. As his heartbeat slowed, fading toward stillness, he sank deeper into its embrace. His last thoughts were gratitude that his sacrifice had saved his daughter’s life.

At least he hadn’t died for noth…

When Castiel heard Sam take the call from a worried Dr. Hartwell, his first thought was that Chloe Sikes was in danger. As the call progressed, with no mention of any particular patient in distress, least of all Chloe, Castiel couldn’t shake the sense that the young woman might need his help. At that first meeting, he’d been struck by the uncanny physical resemblance between Chloe and Claire as well as their similar fashion sense, although Chloe’s jeans were made with an elasticated waistline. Chloe lacked Claire’s left-side braids in her blond hair, but she wore it back with a hairclip, revealing a collection of ear piercings reminiscent of Claire’s.