Supernatural--Cold Fire (25 page)

“Amelia?” he whispered.

Amelia Richardson? Here? Why…?

He started walking to her, about to call out, to ask her what she was doing in Braden Heights—

An elderly couple crossed his path. He’d been so distracted by the sight of his old flame, he’d nearly run into them. “Excuse me,” he said, flashing a friendly and, he hoped, apologetic smile for almost bowling them over in his haste.

“Quite all right, young man,” the woman said. “Old as we are, you’d think we’d look both ways before crossing—well, walking down the middle of the street.”

Sam smiled politely at her attempt at humor.

After they passed him, he looked up, Amelia’s name again on his lips. But this time he didn’t say it aloud. She was gone. He looked left and right.

How far could she have gone?

The crowd had thinned considerably, so she’d definitely stand out in that red dress, but he couldn’t locate her. For a split-second, he glimpsed an older, hunched woman who looked like she’d never been exposed to the sun, drifting behind several onlookers, but his gaze swept past her, seeking the red dress, and when he looked back the other way, the old woman had disappeared as well. If one more person dropped out of view as suddenly, he’d begin to suspect open manhole covers lined the street.

After a slow 360 turn came up empty, he had to chalk the sighting up to a trick of his imagination. Stress induced? Lack of sleep? Had he been thinking about Amelia? They’d gotten pretty serious—at least until she found out her husband hadn’t been killed overseas. But Sam’s relationship with her had been a while ago. He’d put it behind him. At least he’d thought he had…

He worried about Dean and his Mark-induced visions. So now wasn’t a great time for both Winchester brothers to get distracted by hallucinations. He shook off the incident and strode toward the Impala.

Fortunately, Dean had been talking with Castiel and hadn’t seen Sam bumbling around, looking confused, so he had no need to explain himself. As Sam approached the front passenger door, Castiel climbed into his Lincoln and made a U-turn.

Before Dean climbed into the driver’s seat he looked across the roof of the car at Sam. “Ready?”

“Cass in a rush?”

“Volunteered to check on Chloe and Olivia,” Dean said. “They’re probably safe for now. At least until the babies are born. Tentacle Tessa doesn’t target pregnant women.”

Dean slipped into the Impala and started the engine. As soon as it roared to life, Dean flipped through the town’s rock stations, settling on CCR’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”

After one last glimpse back to where he thought he’d seen Amelia, Sam opened the passenger side door and climbed in. “She’s branching out, Dean,” he said. “First the boyfriends and husbands of the pregnant women. Now the babies. We don’t know what’s next.”

“So let’s find out.”

* * *

Back at the motel, Dean flopped on his bed, grumbling about the lumpy mattress as he stared at the ceiling. Sam opened his laptop and, with unmoving fingers resting on the keyboard, stared at the screen. Not a productive start by any means.
Maybe Castiel had the right idea
, Sam thought.
At least he has a clear task.

Without the crutch of the bunker’s vast library of hunter lore, they had to go about the hunt the old-fashioned way. They had multiple victims, a few clues, and a definite, if still emerging pattern.

As tempting as it was to cast suspicion on Riza Nodd’s illegitimate adult child, whoever he or she might be, they couldn’t ignore all the evidence pointing to a supernatural entity. A human may have set the monster on its murderous course, but the monster was what they needed to stop. And to stop it, they needed to identify it and learn its weaknesses.

Problem was, monsters weren’t listed in the phone book, in print or online. But if the murders were triggered by Sally’s arrival in Braden Heights because of her relationship to the Larkin family, then maybe that was where he had to start. He took out a pen and legal pad and started making notes on property records and sales dating back from when the town was called Larkin’s Korner to the present day. Finally, he pushed the laptop aside as he pored over those notes.

“Mind if I use that?” Dean asked, indicating the laptop.

“Go ahead,” Sam said.

“I have an idea,” Dean said, turning the computer around to face him and opening the web browser. After a few minutes, he seemed engrossed in his search.

“So the Larkin heirs are in London,” Sam said. “One parcel of untended farmland recently sold to a developer building single family homes, currently under construction as… Coventry Crossing. Another recent sale was for a lot with a farmhouse and barn. From the photo I saw, they were in bad shape. That land is adjacent to the Stanton Fertility Clinic. Plans are to raze the farmhouse and barn.”

“Stanton,” Dean repeated. “That’s next to LMC. Where we met Chloe Sikes.”

“Right,” Sam said. “We drove by the construction.”

“For the expanded parking lot,” Dean said.

“Before we talked to Melissa,” Sam said, “Cordero mentioned the Barrows used Stanton for their IVF cycles.”

“Think I got something, Sammy,” Dean said.

“What?”

“Checked into a Philippines angle,” Dean said. “Since Calvin Nodd met Malaya there before they came to Nodd’s hometown.”

“Right,” Sam said, curious.

“Take a look,” Dean said, turning the laptop around again to face Sam. “It talks about disembowelments, sucking out eyeballs.”

Sam set down his notes and scanned the browser windows Dean had opened. “There’s information here about a pontianak… and some overlapping stuff about a langsuir. Created when a woman dies in childbirth.” He looked up at Dean. “Like Malaya?”

“Keep reading.”

“Preys on men,” Sam read from the screen. “That fits… Sucks out the eyeballs if you stare at it directly… This also talks about the langsuir sucking the blood of infants, like a tiny vampire. You know she’s nearby if you hear a crying baby or smell a pleasant aroma.”

“Like fresh baked pies?” Dean wondered aloud, as if the tradeoff would be worth the inconvenience of a subsequent disembowelment.

“She can appear… as a beautiful woman,” Sam read and paused.

“I missed that,” Dean said, craning his neck for a better view of the screen. “Any beautiful woman?”

Sam’s mind jumped back to the Barrows crime scene. He thought he’d seen Amelia when there was no possible reason for her to be in Braden Heights. But later, he’d seen a hunched woman dressed in black slip into the crowd and disappear. Was that second sighting closer to her true appearance? And had she been watching them at the scene? A predator recognizing a hunter? Or like an arsonist who hangs around to watch his handiwork?

Was it too late to confess his hallucination of Amelia? If he told Dean now, he’d have to admit concealing it previously. And they’d made an effort to stop keeping secrets from each other. The information—the pontianak’s ability—was out there now. Dean would know to look for it. Maybe that was good enough.

“Doesn’t say,” Sam told him. “Probably. But, uh, it also says she can separate her head from her body.”

“Saw the illustration,” Dean said. “Raises the freaky quotient. So how do we gank it?”

Sam scrolled down, skimming the information in both windows. “Putting a nail in the hole in her neck puts her down.”

“Guess that’s the tentacle hole.”

“But if you remove the nail, she’s back in business,” Sam said. “Like it only puts her to sleep or into some sort of supernatural coma. But she’s scared of thorns and sharp objects.”

“Forget thorns,” Dean said. “We have no shortage of sharp objects.”

“We can put her to sleep long enough to figure out how to end her,” Sam said. “But first we have to find her.”

“Those recent Larkin land sales and construction?” Dean said. “Probably not a coincidence.”

“Makes sense,” Sam said. “What if the pontianak is somehow… locked to Larkin land? What if she has been since Malaya died here?”

“So when she’s not gutting fathers-to-be and feeding off the blood of infants, she heads back to her little Pontiac lair.”

Sam was about to correct the mispronunciation, but guessed it was deliberate on Dean’s part. At least he’d stopped calling her Tentacle Tessa. “Far as we know, she’s been inactive for the past fifty-odd years… some kind of hibernation, maybe?”

“But Sally’s arrival or the new construction on former Larkin land woke her up.”

“For her, it might seem as if no time has passed.”

* * *

Castiel attributed more than coincidence to Chloe and Olivia going into labor at the same time. As soon as Dr. Hartwell mentioned the calls from her service, Castiel became concerned for the safety of both women. Maybe in another place and under different circumstances, coincidence would be sufficient explanation. But in Braden Heights, coincidences involving pregnant women had proved disturbing in the case of the newborns and fatal for their fathers.

Before they left the Barrows scene, Castiel volunteered to keep an eye on both women. The Winchesters didn’t need him for research and Castiel couldn’t help wondering if this was the moment of Chloe’s greatest danger. Maybe the connection he’d felt to her, seeing her as Claire during their brief introduction, had been some sort of premonition telling Castiel he would need to be there for Chloe the same way he hoped to be there should Claire ever need him. Based upon the evidence they’d collected, the clawed monster targeted the men before the babies were born and preyed on the newborns soon after birth. But what about the pregnant women during childbirth? That’s when they would be most vulnerable. At this point, they were still guessing about the identity and motives of the cannibal woman.

Though he’d offered to keep an eye on Chloe and Olivia, he had neither the home address of the former, nor the hotel address for the latter. He doubted Jesse Vetter would check his baby’s surrogate mother into a low-quality motel, which left a couple of mid-range options and a luxury hotel in the heart of the downtown district. Three, possibly four addresses to check. Chloe, on the other hand, lived with her parents and would have had no reason to change locations. He dialed Captain Sands, identified himself with his FBI alias, and requested Chloe’s home address. Less than ten minutes later, he drove down the Sikes’ street. As he scanned the house numbers, he spotted Chloe’s father loading a pink and white striped duffel bag into the back of a blue Ford Escape. Chloe was already in the front seat of the car, her mother in the back.

Castiel pulled into the nearest parking space, engine idling, waiting until they drove past the Lincoln to follow them to Lovering Maternity Center at a discreet distance. They might recognize him from their prior meeting and he didn’t wish to alarm them. Chloe could be safe from danger but she was already dealing with the tragic death of her baby’s father. On top of that, she had to endure hours of difficult labor pains. Castiel wouldn’t compound her anxiety without cause. He could be overly cautious without alarming her—or Olivia Krum. But if the danger became real and immediate, he would be on hand to intervene.

At Lovering Maternity Center, Castiel parked in the visitor lot in a space where he had a view of the porte cochère. The blue Escape stopped at the lobby entrance. Chloe’s mother hurried inside and returned less than a minute later with a wheelchair she steered to the front passenger door. After Chloe situated herself in the chair, left hand clutching the armrest, right hand nervously rubbing her round abdomen, her mother pushed her toward the lobby doors. Meanwhile, her father unloaded the duffel bag and parked the SUV.

Castiel left his Lincoln and walked slowly toward the lobby, looking left and right for anything unusual. Would the monster attack out in the open? She seemed to prefer isolated targets, the men and infants alike.

A flash of unnaturally fast movement caught his attention.

A pale green Prius sped toward the lobby entrance as Chloe and her parents made their way inside. The hybrid’s driver traveled at a speed much too fast for a parking lot frequented by slow-moving pregnant women and recent mothers shepherding newborns home. Frowning, Castiel picked up his pace, almost running to intercept the vehicle. Though he doubted the driver would be the monster they sought, a human agent might also be involved in the murders.

With barely a glance back at the reckless driver’s car, Chloe and her parents entered the maternity center.

Castiel slowed when he saw the driver emerge from the car.

Jesse Vetter hurried around to the passenger side of the Prius, then stood patiently as the woman inside rolled down her window, said something calmly and pointed toward the building. Jesse pressed both palms to his face, shook his head, seemed to take several deep breaths, then walked to the back of the car, opened the trunk to remove a suitcase only to set it down in front of the car. Darting inside the building, he too returned with a wheelchair and helped Olivia into it. She grimaced in pain—
probably experiencing a contraction
, Castiel thought—as he wheeled her to the lobby entrance and set the suitcase down beside her.

Leaving Olivia there, he returned to the car. In his nervous haste, he nearly clipped the bumper of a Dodge Durango, but managed to squeeze the Prius into a tight spot before rushing back to her. A moment later, they too had entered the maternity center without incident.

Castiel took his time crossing the parking lot, examining his surroundings for anything unusual. Ostensibly, he looked for a strange woman with clawed hands—he doubted he’d see the exposed tentacle sprouting from the nape of her neck—but he also examined the cars he passed to determine if anyone was lurking in the area. Since he’d arrived behind the Sikes family, the only car to enter the lot had been the Prius. But as he made his deliberate way to the automatic lobby doors, two other cars arrived and parked. Visitors bearing helium balloons, stuffed animals and boxes of candy. Nothing to arouse suspicion.

With one last sweeping look across the parking lot, he walked into the lobby and approached the familiar middle-aged receptionist at the U-shaped desk.