Supernatural--Cold Fire (33 page)

She’d forgotten one minor detail. Sam still gripped the shotgun in both hands and, no longer pinned under the weight of the cabinet, he could finally move his arms again. With a rapid motion, he worked the shotgun’s slide and blasted a round of rock salt into her black eyes at point blank range. In an instant, the flesh around her eyes was scoured away. The eyes themselves appeared pitted and cloudy, shifting from obsidian to milky white. Howling, she leapt off the smashed cabinet.

Freeing his legs, Sam scrambled away on all fours, desperately trying to put some distance between them. Blinded or not, she came after him, her bare feet slapping lightly against the cold wooden floor. He rolled over, shoving the shotgun barrel crosswise over his head, barely in time to block her claws. Parrying a second and a third blow, his arms grew numb from the sheer force of her attacks.

A fourth blow dislodged the shotgun from his grasp and she swatted it aside. It struck the black door then fell to the floor, far out of reach. She oriented on Sam’s breathing, waiting a moment as the white film seemed to evaporate from her eyes, restoring them to pure black. Flashing her wicked, pointy-toothed smile, she raised her arms and pounced.

Sam rolled under the bed, avoiding the swipe of claws, which raked deep furrows in the wooden floor inches from his leg. With a frustrated roar, she backhanded the hospital bed, sending it sailing across the workroom, trailing its rotted mattress, pillow and stained bed covers before it crashed into the far corner of the room.

Gulping breaths of the fetid air, Sam sat on the floor with his knees drawn up, arms outstretched behind him, palms pressed to the floor for support.

Riza loomed over him, claws twitching at her side, ready to counter any move he made, seconds away from gutting him like a fish and feasting on his organs. He had to wonder if she’d gouge out his eyes before or after.

Once Castiel confirmed that both Assistant Chief Cordero and Captain Sands had the Barrows and Atherton situations under control, he assured Malik he and his two fellow FBI agents would have a solution soon. Promising to call when it was safe to release Brianna from her bonds, Castiel left the Green home and drove his Lincoln Continental Mark V to the old Larkin farmhouse with little regard for posted speed limits. Calls to Sam’s and Dean’s phones went to voicemail. Either they’d lost their cell signal underground or, more likely, close proximity to the pontianak interfered with reception.

If the Winchesters had defeated the creature, he would have heard from them by now. Their continued silence meant they were in danger or they had…

No sense dwelling on what might have happened.

Flicking on his high beams to illuminate the dark country road ahead, he pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor and the large car roared through the night. When he passed the billboard announcing the strip mall outlet stores, he hit the brake and spotted the gravel driveway leading up to the dark farmhouse and barn.

His tires rolled over the lowered chain and crunched along the gravel incline until he noticed the silhouette of the Impala at the top of the gentle hill. After parking beside the Chevy, Castiel strode purposely toward the barn, his flashlight sweeping back and forth to light the way. Entering through the open side door that faced the farmhouse, he proceeded down the short hallway between the feed and tack rooms. A few moments later, he located the formerly hidden doorway panel that led to the underground passage. About to descend, he paused at the sound of shuffling. It seemed to be coming from both ends of the wide corridor that ran the length of the barn.

“Sam? Dean?” Castiel called. “Are you injured?”

Out of the darkness, shambling shapes resolved as silhouettes, two approaching from one side, three from the other. All five of the hunched shapes belonged to women, their features cloaked in shadow, out of range of the flashlight.

“Five…”

The number was significant.

Calvin Nodd murdered five pregnant young women after Riza.

Another few steps, and his flashlight revealed their pale forms as they formed a circle around him. Each wore tattered clothing, caked with dirt from their shallow graves. Mud-streaked, their bare limbs reminded him of something. Another moment and it came to him. The fleeting memory of white sycamore limbs poking out of the loose mounds of earth at the Coventry Crossing construction site. Had he been that close to finding them? And while he helped Malik fend off his sister’s attacks, had they somehow arisen and walked through the night? As a pontianak, Riza Nodd must have reanimated them and called them to her.

To defend her? Or to kill for her? Or both.

He examined them with the flashlight beam, one by one. They were hunched and decayed, faces obscured by matted hair, but had more flesh on their bones than he would have expected after five decades. Each had a large, rounded abdomen, as they continued to carry the rotted husks of their unborn children long after their deaths.

A moment later, he noticed that they were changing, evolving. In addition to regaining flesh lost to death and decay, claws visibly grew at the end of their elongated fingers and crooked grins revealed pointed teeth bursting through anemic gums. They were themselves transforming into pontianaks.

Determined to stop the growing threat they represented, Castiel belatedly realized they had him surrounded, cut off from the door to the underground passageway. One swiped at him with her newfound claws. He ducked to the side to avoid the blow, but another shoved him from behind with enough force to knock him down.

Soon they’ll have the full strength of a pontianak.

They stared down at him, inching forward, their circle contracting. In the pale wash of his flashlight, their dark eyes seemed to glow with a cold fire. If they were evolving into the form of pontianaks, he knew of one way to put them down. He reached for the heavy metal weapon in his jacket pocket. If he’d known then what he knew now, he would have brought four more.

One at a time
, he told himself.

Then the one standing directly in front of him shimmered and resolved into a new form. At first, he thought the change represented a stage in the human-to-pontianak transformation but she looked more human now, not less; different, but more than familiar to him. Whoever she had been before death, that identity had vanished, replaced by another. He blinked several times, but the face defied logic.

The face belonged to Claire Novak.

Dean shook off the mental cobwebs, unsure how long he’d been out cold.

But a loud crash had brought him back to struggling consciousness.

Last thing he remembered was taking a violent, overhand swing at the pontianak, coming in at an angle sure to lop off her foul-smelling head, but she’d caught his wrist and tossed him across the room like a rag doll. As he shifted his position, he noticed all the broken, crumbly plywood around his legs and on his jeans. Remarkably, the flashlight still worked, spreading a wan illumination across the room. His upper torso was wedged into a hole in the wall his own body had created on impact. He had an inkling what it might feel like to be Wile E. Coyote.

Another muddled moment passed before he realized he’d broken through a false wall into a hidden compartment. To his left, he saw the overturned hospital bed in the corner. In the center of the room, Riza Nodd stood over Sam—who’d lost the shotgun, not that it had done him much good—and looked about one hot second away from gutting him or snatching his eyeballs. Maybe the indecision about which assault to commit first was the only thing holding her back.

Dean’s machete lay just out of reach. He’d need to lunge forward to grab it. But if he didn’t distract Riza pronto, Sam was a goner.

He tried to rise, felt resistance and heaved himself upward.

Something rattled and shifted behind him.

Glancing up, Dean startled at the sight of a withered corpse, little more than a skeleton. “Whoa!”

Riza surged forward, taking a swipe at Sam, who dropped flat on his back to evade her claws. At the same time, he raised his legs and struck her in the abdomen with the soles of his boots. She staggered back a few steps, not nearly far enough.

Dean lurched upward to pry himself out of the gap in the false wall, while half expecting the skeleton to reanimate and throttle him with its bony hands. His violent movement jarred the skeleton again, and this time the skull—with scattered patches of shoulder-length blond hair and a paper-thin sheath of skin stretched taut over the bone—broke free, striking Dean in the chest before falling into the main room and rolling unevenly toward Riza.

Pausing in her attack on Sam, Riza fixed on the displaced skull, sensing… something.

Sam looked over his shoulder, staring at the headless skeleton as Dean pried himself free and snatched the machete by the handle. Glancing back to see what had caught Sam’s attention, he noticed the corpse in the wall wore the remnants of a black leather jacket.

Sam pointed at the skeleton, but turned to face the pontianak.

“That’s him…” Sam said. “That’s Ronnie. He never abandoned you, Riza. It was your father. He killed Ronnie and lied to you about it.”

Riza stared at the skull. Then her head slowly rose to stare at the body hidden in the wall all these years, in her own lair. She’d never known.

Sam eased out of her line of sight and climbed gradually to his feet, his motions slow and deliberate, nothing to startle her or trigger a reflexive attack. A single swipe of her claws could gut him or rip out his throat.

Riza Nodd trembled with indecision.

Perhaps questioning her purpose: Her reason for vengeance had been built on half-truths and lies. Her father had been the cause of all her misery, her death and the death of the man she loved and thought had abandoned her.

Dean crouched, watching and waiting as Sam eased around Riza. His brother’s hand had slipped into his jacket pocket. Dean’s hand drifted to the metal object in his own jacket, one of the railroad spikes they purchased at On Track Locomotive Repair before coming to the farmhouse. Despite Riza’s indecision, Sam had to know other lives were still in danger. He couldn’t wait. There was still only one way for this to end. No mercy. Sam had to put her down.

Impatience surged within Dean. The need to act, to attack, to take the decision out of Sam’s hands and kill her himself verged on overwhelming. When his impatience transformed into a simmering anger, he caught himself. Branded on his forearm, the Mark of Cain had begun to itch and throb, almost a burning sensation, goading him into a reckless assault. With considerable effort, he restrained the urge. The rational side of him knew that if he charged the pontianak now, he risked not just his own life, but Sam’s.

Riza’s hands twitched.

Maybe she sensed Sam removing the railroad spike from his pocket, holding it concealed in his hand, inching behind her. If she turned now…

A battle raged silently within Dean as he struggled not only to ignore the siren call of rage from the Mark, burning with the heat of white phosphorus, but to remain utterly still while suppressing it. A sheen of sweat dampened his brow. He couldn’t attack her but—

“Your father,” Dean called out, loud enough for her to hear without startling her. As he’d hoped, her gaze darted to her left, toward him and further away from Sam. “Real Edgar Allan Poe fan. Except plywood instead of bricks.”

Still, Sam hesitated.

Don’t let this go sideways…

Finally, Dean couldn’t wait any longer. “Do it, Sammy!”