A Case of Do or Die 6/8
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Chapter 6
Round Up the Usual Suspects
Sam—tall, lanky, long-haired Sam, pale-faced and hollow-eyed—stumbled back a couple of steps and watched the sigil fade. He’d put a few drops of blood on the bag’s handle and had been careful to slide the bag through so the jar of holy oil wouldn’t break. He could only hope that it would land in the right time.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Here came Dean.
Sam shrugged. “Dad didn’t have any holy oil.”
“Dammit, keeping the portal open for me to get back just about killed you.”
“I was only sending a bag, Dean.”
“Bed.”
Sam sighed and let Dean manhandle him into his bedroom—the first time in thirty-one years they’d both been alive and together and had their own bedrooms for more than a week—and back into bed. Bed was soft; Dean had insisted on getting him one of those memory-foam mattresses, swore it would make him feel better.
Sam wasn’t sure anything would make him feel better. Not now.
“Shoulda let me finish,” he said quietly as Dean tucked him in.
“Sammy.” Still ‘Sammy’ after all these years. And yeah, they infuriated each other, but Sam still loved his Dean more than life itself.
“’M not gonna get better, dude. I can still finish the trial; ’s not too late.”
“You know why I can’t let you do that.”
“But Dean....”
“Don’t you ‘But Dean’ me!” Dean tried to look stern, but all he managed was anguished. “It’s in Dad’s hands now.”
Sam grabbed hold of Dean’s arm. “’S not fair. Shouldn’t hafta choose between me an’ Dad.”
“Shut up.” But Dean couldn’t keep his voice from breaking.
“Dean....”
“Look, I meant what I said. There is nothing I would put in front of you. Not even Dad.”
“He’ll make it, Dean. He’ll do it.”
“I know.” And that knowledge was eating Dean alive.
“I wonder if... if we’ll remember when it happens. If we’ll know.”
“I hope not,” Dean whispered.
“John. John. Wake up, son.”
John woke with a start to find himself in the same bedroom in the bunker as he’d seen in his dream, but instead of Dean sitting beside him, it was Pops shaking him awake. He had a vague memory of stumbling in early that morning (or was it?), but he didn’t remember falling asleep.
But he didn’t have time to dwell on it, because the next words out of Pops’ mouth were, “How old did you say your boys are?”
“Um.” John’s voice was rough with sleep, and his mind wasn’t too clear yet, but he thought he remembered the right answer. “Eight an’ four?”
“Come on. There’s a story coming up on the news you need to see.”
“C’n I have some coffee?” John asked as Pops dragged him to his feet.
“Already waiting, Sport. C’mon.”
John felt like death warmed over, to be honest. The first trial had done a number on him, but it hadn’t been this bad. His fever had risen, he thought, and all he really wanted to do was sleep. But the newscast got his pulse going faster than the caffeine did when they went to a commercial break with, “Coming up next: A sudden outbreak of a mysterious illness is affecting four-year-olds nationwide. Could your child be at risk? Stay tuned.”
John swore.
Pops nodded. “That’s why I woke you.”
“Thanks.”
John guzzled his coffee during the break and was on the edge of his seat while the reporter chronicled the eerily similar cases of Max Miller, Jake Talley, and Ava Wilson, none of whom had anything in common except a cough that had started producing blood and a fever that had spiked—all at exactly the same time. Doctors were baffled by the outbreak. “There’s no common point of contact or any clear vector for this disease,” one expert said. “A number of the children were exposed to smoke from a house fire when they were six months old, but even there, there’s no clear correlation....”
John flung himself out of the room and to the nearest telephone.
Ellen picked up on the first ring. “Oh, John, thank God,” she nearly sobbed when he identified himself. “Bill didn’t have a number where we could reach you.”
“I just saw the news about the kids coughing up blood.”
“Sammy’s one of them. They’re calling him Patient Zero, in fact, as if he started the whole thing. They had to Lifeflight him to Omaha last night.”
“Omaha, Omaha—Children’s Hospital?”
“Right. Bill’s there with Dean, and Jim and Bobby are on their way, if they’re not already there. Where are you?”
“Lebanon still. Again.” Dammit, he needed more coffee.
And Ellen could tell. “John, are you all right?”
“Yeah, yeah, just... second trial took a lot out of me. Look, I’ll get Pops and get out there as quick as we can.”
“Okay. Want me to call and let them know you’re coming?”
“That’d be good, thanks.”
“Four hours?”
“Make it five, ’case we have to stop.”
“Good thinking. I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks, Ellen. We’ll be in touch.” And John hung up.
When he got back to the main lobby, he spotted Pops standing in the middle of the library, looking lost. “Healing texts,” Pops thought aloud as John approached. “Surely there’s a section of healing texts in here somewhere.” He went to a random shelf and picked out a book to start flipping through.
John mentally scanned through the list of allies that the boys had sent back with the trial description and hit on a plan before Pops could realize he was looking at the wrong book. Then John went to the card catalogue, found the card he needed, and headed toward a different shelf.
Pops looked up, confused. “Aren’t those the summoning texts?”
“Yup. Do me a favor? Call Directory Assistance and find out if there’s a Hindu temple in Omaha.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, Pops.” John found the book he wanted and brought it to the table, then went to find a pen and some paper.
By the time he got back, Pops was finishing up on the phone. “No temple,” he reported, “but I did find a guru who gave me coordinates for a good place to perform a summoning.”
“Awesome.” John found the summoning he needed, copied it down, and handed it to Pops. “Here’s what we need.”
Pops looked even more confused but nodded. “I should be able to find all of this in the lab. But why—”
“Pops. Trust me.”
“All right. Go eat while I gather everything.”
John’s stomach rebelled at the thought of food, but he did go to the kitchen to fill a travel mug with coffee. He forced himself to eat a banana, too, just so he could say he had.
He was just throwing the peel away when Pops came in with a satchel. “All right, we’re set. Let’s go.”
John nodded and grabbed his travel mug. “Hospital first.”
“Of course. Best to know what we’re dealing with first-hand.”
John drove as far as he could, but he barely made it to the Platte River before he had to pull over and trade places with Pops.
Visiting hours were long since over by the time they arrived at the hospital, but when Bill came down to confirm that John was Sammy’s father and that Henry was kin, the staff let them in to see Sammy. Dean was sitting in the ICU waiting room with a nurse and trying to watch TV when Bill led them that far, but he gasped when he saw John and ran to hug him.
“Dad!” The exclamation was just shy of a sob. “You’re here!”
“Came as soon as I could, son,” John replied, returning the hug.
Dean held on for a moment, then backed away. “Dad, are you okay?”
“Be a lot better when I know what’s going on here. Tell me what happened.”
“You’d been gone ten days or so when Sammy started coughing in the middle of the night. We all thought it was just a cold at first, but it didn’t get better. So Ellen took him to the doctor, and he said he’d coughed up a little blood. The doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so he just gave Sammy some cough medicine. And th-then last night... all of a sudden, it got worse. A lot worse. He couldn’t stop coughing, and it was bloody, and he had a real bad fever, and... and they had to bring him here, and they still don’t know what’s wrong.”
Pops stepped forward. “What time did the change occur?”
Dean looked from Pops to John in confusion.
“It’s okay, Dean,” John said quietly, so the nurse couldn’t quite overhear. “This is your Grandpa Henry. He’s cool.”
Dean sighed and looked away as he thought. “I... I don’t remember. Late, like maybe midnight.”
John’s sense of time was still skewed, but Pops looked grave enough that John suspected that was about the time he completed the second trial. He sighed. “Okay. Take me to him.”
The nurse stood at that point. “Mr. Winchester, if you yourself are ill—”
“Chemo,” John and Dean interrupted at the same time.
“It’s an experimental treatment I’m undergoing at MD Anderson,” John continued. “I just got the second round, but I had to come check on my son. There’s no risk of contagion on my part.”
The nurse sighed. “All right, but we can’t expose you to any infectious diseases, either.”
“Is there evidence that Sammy’s contagious?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Then let me see my son.”
Pops cleared his throat. “Ma’am, I’m not only the boys’ relative; I also work for the CDC. Perhaps my division would be able to locate a treatment better if I could send a first-hand report.”
The nurse sighed. “All right. This way.”
Dean grabbed John’s hand and held it all the way into the ICU unit where Sammy was staying. Poor Sammy was barely visible amid the cooling blankets and wires and tubes, but he didn’t look much better than John felt. He snuffled miserably and coughed once as John gently brushed his hair back from his forehead, and then a major coughing fit hit. John clamped a tissue over Sammy’s mouth to catch any blood that might go flying, tried not to grimace when something hot and sticky did hit the tissue, and rubbed Sammy’s back until the fit passed. By the end of it, Dean had plastered himself to John’s side.
Sammy’s eyes fluttered open as John helped him to lie back again. “Dad?” he whispered hoarsely.
“I’m here, kiddo,” John whispered back. “I’ll find a way to fix this, I swear.”
Sammy smiled. “Knew you’d come. Love you.” And he was asleep again—and John had a moment of bizarre double vision, with the image before him overlaid by the image of grown-up Sam falling asleep in the bunker. The two images even coughed at the same time.
But why was Sammy suffering now when John was the one doing the trials?
“Dad?” Dean prompted. “You okay?”
John nodded, folded up the bloody tissue, and tucked it into his pocket. “I’ll be all right. Look, Pops and I need to go do something, make some calls, but we’ll be back soon.”
“How soon?”
“Couple of hours, maybe. Before daylight, for sure. I’m not leaving town until Sammy’s better.”
Dean relaxed a little. “Okay.”
John gave Dean another hug and rubbed Sammy’s shoulder once more, and then he tore himself away and left with Pops.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, John,” Pops said quietly as they rode the elevator back down to the lobby.
“I do,” John replied. “I just hope it works. Nice save on the CDC cover, by the way.”
“I do—did—have credentials from most of the major agencies. Never asked whether they were real or not. I have no idea where they are, though, and even if I did, they’d be woefully out of date.”
“Hell, if you need ’em, Bobby can get you fixed up.”
“Let’s hope I don’t.”
Pops drove to the coordinates the guru had given him, which turned out to be a vacant lot on the west side of town. Then he hung back to watch the car while John performed the summoning. John thus couldn’t see Pops’ reaction when the petite dark-skinned goddess in the red sari appeared on the far side of the summoning bowl.
“What?” she asked flatly, arms crossed.
“Sorry to disturb you, Kali-Ma,” John answered. “I’m looking for Loki, and I hear you know him better than most.”
Kali raised one eyebrow. “And why do you seek Loki?”
“My son is ill. I understand he can help me find a cure.”
She raised her other eyebrow and began circling him, studying him from head to toe. He stood his ground and pretended not to be aware of how her gaze penetrated to his very soul. After she’d made one complete circuit, she walked up to him, studied his face, and then suddenly swiped nails like tiger claws across his cheek. It drew blood, but he didn’t flinch.
She looked at the blood on her fingers, then smiled at him. “Because you hate demons as much as I do, I will do this for you. Wait.” And she vanished.
He swayed briefly, surprised at the effort it had taken to withstand her scrutiny. But by the time he’d taken a deep breath and let it out again, she had returned, her two left hands holding the ear and arm of a white male with slicked-back brown hair and hazel eyes. Said male, who was presumably Loki, was attempting unsuccessfully to twist out of her grasp.
“Kali, what the hells—OW!” Loki yelped as she swiped at him with one left hand the way she’d swiped at John. “What was that for?!”
She didn’t answer, simply pressed the blood-coated fingertips of her left and right hands together. There was a flash, and John got a brief glimpse of chains made of light binding him to her captive, whom she then released.
“What was that for?” Loki repeated, exasperated.
“He needs your help, Loki,” she stated mildly. “I simply made sure you would give it.” She licked the blood off her right index finger as if it were chocolate, and John felt the gashes in his cheek close and disappear. Then she stepped up to him again. “I don’t know how much any blessing I can give will help you now, but you have it for whatever it is worth. The rest is in your hands.”
John nodded slowly. “Thank you, Kali.”
She nodded back and left.
Loki huffed. “You are looney tunes, you know that? Not only do you look to a Trickster for help, but you get a guy’s ex involved—”
“Gabriel,” John interrupted.
Loki froze with his mouth open, then shut it.
“Never mind how I know who you are. I’m pretty sure you know who I am. I started trying to close the gates of Hell in order to save my sons. I was fine with giving my life for them. But now these trials are killing both me and my son, along with a lot of other kids his age, and I need to know how to fix that.”
Loki—Gabriel—chuckled nervously. “That, my friend, is way above my pay grade. If you think I’m getting involved, think again. I’m l—” He turned as if to disappear, but the light chains appeared again and pulled him back.
John grabbed Gabriel by the scruff of the neck. “You’re not going anywhere except with me. Move it.”
Gabriel spluttered and squirmed but had no choice but to let John drag him to the car and all but throw him into the back seat.
“That’s who you were after?” Pops asked, surprised, as John slammed the back door shut.
“Pops, just drive,” John groaned and jogged around to the passenger side.
Gabriel was silent all the way back to the hospital and into Sammy’s room, where Pops did a quick song and dance to convince the staff that Gabriel was one of his CDC coworkers. But barely had John sat back down at Sammy’s bedside than Sammy had another coughing fit, worse than before. When it was over, John felt as exhausted as Sammy looked.
He turned to Gabriel, whose sullen expression had faded into something closer to worry. “I don’t even know what’s wrong with him,” he whispered, unable to keep a pleading note out of his voice. “The trials are causing it, but....”
Gabriel sighed. “It’s probably the demon blood.”
John blinked several times. “Demon blood?”
Gabriel nodded. “See, Lucifer had this plan. Long story short, he was looking for a special child who would grow up to release him from Hell and then consent to be his vessel.”
“Vessel? You mean—”
“Yeah, possession. Angels are limited to certain bloodlines and have to get consent. You should—well, no, you don’t remember, but you’re Michael’s vessel in your generation. Dean is Mike’s vessel in his generation, and Sam, unfortunately, is supposed to be Lucifer’s, since he’s your second son. But Luci couldn’t say that to Azazel, so he left his instructions vague. And Azazel made a bunch of deals without telling anyone that the fine print allowed him to feed his blood to a deal-victim’s six-month-old child, so the child’s body would produce trace amounts of demon blood and presumably be primed to house Luci when the time came.”
John ran a hand over his face. “And one of the deals was with Mary. That’s why he was in our house.”
“Bingo.”
“So now all those children are... are coughing up the demon blood?”
“That’s my guess.”
John carded his fingers through Sammy’s hair and thought back to the vision of his grown sons, to Missouri sobbing and refusing to tell him why, and wondered whether the potential possession by Lucifer had any part to play in the many things she’d said he didn’t want to know. Then he looked up at Gabriel again. “If... if I finish this... would Sammy be safe?”
Gabriel pursed his lips. “Hard to tell. Shutting down the Pit would derail the plan as it stands now. There is a second method of opening the Cage that Lucifer may or may not know exists. I do know that he doesn’t know exactly what it is. I don’t know if Mike’s so sold on the destiny gag that he’d decide to open the Cage himself, or if any of my other idiot brothers would try to manipulate the boys into doing it for them.”
“But if we can cure Sammy of the demon blood....”
“Then Luci would be without a permanent vessel. He might still try to take Sam, but Sam wouldn’t survive it. And if there’s one thing I know about my brother, it’s that he hates being denied a chew toy that would last him a while.”
John took a deep breath and let it out again. “Do you know of a cure?”
Gabriel held up his hands. “Hey, whoa. I’m a messenger, not a doctor, and I’m kind of in Witness Protection these days. And I’m guessing we really don’t want Mike or Rapha involved right now.”
Sammy coughed and shifted, which caused the IV drip to rattle and catch John’s eye. And suddenly John had a plan.
He went to the door and called softly for Pops, who was standing in the hall. “Where’s Bill?”
“Out in the waiting room with Dean. You need him?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Pops nodded, left, and returned with Bill. “You got something?” Bill asked.
“Pretty sure. But I need Jim.”
Bill understood that completely the wrong way and paled. “John, don’t you dare—”
“Not for last rites! I need him!”
“Why?”
“Dammit, Harvelle, just get him here!”
Bill threw up his hands in surrender and headed to the nurses’ station.
Gabriel frowned. “What are you thinking?”
But Pops, having read all of the notes about the trials, was two steps ahead of Gabriel. “You’re sure that will work for this?”
John shrugged. “What else have we got? Besides, I’ll need to anyway for the third trial.”
“But if Sammy’s not possessed....”
“No, no, not the whole shebang.”
“John, be careful. Josie was there for the first attempt in ’57, the one that backfired so horribly. She said it scared her spitless, and she could have handled almost anything. Well, except Abaddon.”
John shook his head. “It won’t come to that. Not this way. Not with Sammy.”
Gabriel had caught on and nodded. “I think you’re right. And like you said, what else have we got?”
Pops looked from John to Gabriel and back and sighed. “Well. Guess I know what the next entry in my journal will be. And I guess I’ll have to stick around to see how it comes out.”
John smiled. “Thanks, Pops.” And he went back to sit with Sammy until Jim arrived.
Dean came to the door several minutes later. “Dad? Pastor Jim’s here.”
John stood with a groan. “All right, son. Thanks. Why don’t you watch Sammy for me while I go talk with Pastor Jim?”
“’Kay.” Dean came over to take the chair John had just vacated.
John squeezed Dean’s shoulder and went out to the waiting room, where Jim was standing talking with Bill.
“John,” Jim said as John walked up. “Bill said it was urgent. What’s going on?”
“We’d better do this in the chapel,” John replied.
Jim blinked. “The chapel? Why?”
“I’ve got a confession to make.”
Jim’s eyes widened, and he grabbed John’s arm. “All right, then. Come on.”
“Be right back,” John told Bill as Jim hustled him to the elevator.
On the way down to the chapel, Jim sighed. “John, are you sure now’s the time?”
“I’m not starting the third trial yet,” John explained. “If I need to, I’ll get you to hear my confession again when it is time. But if repeated doses of purified blood can cure a full-fledged demon, one dose ought to cure a human kid infected with demon blood, right?”
Jim inclined his head in understanding. “That would be logical, yes.”
“Assuming this works, we can put the word out, get teams of hunters to treat the rest of the kids before I start the last trial.”
“What I don’t understand is why more children than just Sammy were affected.”
“Long story.”
“Those notes made it sound like only the person who had attempted the trials was affected this way.”
John sighed. “Can’t be sure, but... my guess is, he was the only one left.”
“But—but there are dozens, maybe hundreds. How could they all have died?”
“Like Missouri said. We don’t want to know.”
Jim sighed and let the question drop. “Now, remind me. Have you been baptized?”
“As a baby, yeah, I think so. Sort of remember going through Confirmation.”
“All right. Confession and Absolution it is, then.”
They reached the chapel then and, finding it empty, sat down on the front two pews, with Jim turned around to face John. Jim flipped through his prayer book to find what he needed.
“Kinda... don’t know where to start,” John admitted.
“That’s what the liturgy is for,” Jim replied with a kind smile and turned the book around so John could read.
“Please hear my confession,” John began reading, “and pronounce forgiveness in order to fulfill God's will. I, a poor sinner, plead guilty before God of all sins. I have lived as if God did not matter and as if I mattered most. My Lord’s name I have not honored as I should; my worship and prayers have faltered.” This was getting uncomfortably close to home, but he pressed on, even with his voice wavering a little, because Sammy needed him to. “I have not let His love have its way with me, and so my love for others has failed. There are those whom I have hurt, and those whom I have failed to help.” Then his voice gave out on him completely, and he broke down and wept.
Jim rubbed his shoulder. “Keep going, John. No one’s going to hear this except God and me. Get it all out.”
And John did. Every time he’d failed Mary and the boys, every time he’d messed up a hunt or been too slow to respond, every time he hadn’t questioned orders in ’Nam and should have, every time he had questioned orders and shouldn’t have, every time he’d cheated on a test or treated a girl badly, all the years he’d hated Pops for what he now knew were unjust reasons, all of it came tumbling out in a rush of words he wasn’t even sure made sense. Finally, after he’d faltered to a stop, he followed Jim’s finger and read, “I am s-sorry for all of this and ask for grace. I w-want to do better.”
Jim didn’t even look at the book for the next part. Instead, he looked John in the eye as he recited, “God be merciful to you and strengthen your faith. Do you believe that my forgiveness is God’s forgiveness?”
John stifled another sob and nodded.
“In the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ, I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son”—here Jim made the sign of the cross over John—“and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Go in peace.”
“Amen,” John echoed hoarsely and nearly collapsed in exhaustion.
Jim caught him. “Hey, hey, hey. Let’s get you to a bed.”
John shook his head. “Nuh-uh. No time. Sammy needs me.”
Muttering prayers under his breath, Jim hauled John to his feet and back to the elevator. John was steady enough to stand and walk on his own by the time they got back to ICU, but Jim accompanied John to Sammy’s room, probably to make sure John didn’t fall over. Pops took their arrival as his cue to wheedle an empty syringe out of the nurses, and Jim followed Gabriel’s lead in insisting that the treatment they were attempting was classified and barring the nurses from following John and Pops into Sammy’s room.
“Okay, Dean,” John sighed quietly once they were inside. “Is there a barf bucket or something handy?”
Dean looked around and found an emesis basin, which he jumped up to grab and bring back to the bed while John sat down.
“Good. Dunno how this will work, so we may need that. Stand by.”
“Yes, sir,” Dean said seriously.
“Pops?”
Pops handed John the syringe and reminded him of how much to use. John nodded, rolled up his left sleeve, and drew the right amount from a vein. Then he pulled Sammy’s cooling blanket down enough to find a vein in the boy’s neck.
“I’m sorry if this hurts, Sammy,” he whispered, even though Sammy seemed to be asleep. Then, as gently as he could, he slid the needle into the vein and injected the blood.
Nothing happened for several seconds, during which time Pops took the syringe from John and dropped it in the sharps disposal. But then Sammy’s heart rate sped up, and he started breathing harder, as if he were fighting nausea. Dean pushed the emesis basin under Sammy’s chin just before Sammy sat bolt upright and vomited several times, bringing up blood each time but the last. But as the heaves subsided and Sammy relaxed backward against John’s hand and arm, all of his numbers improved drastically—heart rate, respiration, even temperature. His breathing eased, and the fine sweat of a broken fever appeared on his forehead as his color returned to normal.
“I think that did it,” Pops breathed. “You were right, John.”
Sammy took a deep breath, let it out again, and opened his eyes. Then he gasped. “Dad!”
“Hey, Champ,” John replied with a smile. “Feeling better?”
“I feel great!”
John didn’t give a damn at that moment about wires or tubes or anything. He just gathered his baby boy into a tight hug. “Thank God,” he breathed. “Thank God.”
Sammy hummed happily and returned the hug for a moment. Then he pushed at John’s chest as if wanting distance. “Dad, you’re hot. Are you okay?”
No, he wasn’t okay, but he wasn’t going to say so. He just let Sammy go and braced himself on the side rail of the bed. “Just... just need a moment....”
“Dad?” both boys asked.
“Sammy’s okay. That’s... tha’s wha’....” He was vaguely aware that he was slipping out of the chair, but he blacked out completely before he could hit the ground.
Next
Round Up the Usual Suspects
Sam—tall, lanky, long-haired Sam, pale-faced and hollow-eyed—stumbled back a couple of steps and watched the sigil fade. He’d put a few drops of blood on the bag’s handle and had been careful to slide the bag through so the jar of holy oil wouldn’t break. He could only hope that it would land in the right time.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Here came Dean.
Sam shrugged. “Dad didn’t have any holy oil.”
“Dammit, keeping the portal open for me to get back just about killed you.”
“I was only sending a bag, Dean.”
“Bed.”
Sam sighed and let Dean manhandle him into his bedroom—the first time in thirty-one years they’d both been alive and together and had their own bedrooms for more than a week—and back into bed. Bed was soft; Dean had insisted on getting him one of those memory-foam mattresses, swore it would make him feel better.
Sam wasn’t sure anything would make him feel better. Not now.
“Shoulda let me finish,” he said quietly as Dean tucked him in.
“Sammy.” Still ‘Sammy’ after all these years. And yeah, they infuriated each other, but Sam still loved his Dean more than life itself.
“’M not gonna get better, dude. I can still finish the trial; ’s not too late.”
“You know why I can’t let you do that.”
“But Dean....”
“Don’t you ‘But Dean’ me!” Dean tried to look stern, but all he managed was anguished. “It’s in Dad’s hands now.”
Sam grabbed hold of Dean’s arm. “’S not fair. Shouldn’t hafta choose between me an’ Dad.”
“Shut up.” But Dean couldn’t keep his voice from breaking.
“Dean....”
“Look, I meant what I said. There is nothing I would put in front of you. Not even Dad.”
“He’ll make it, Dean. He’ll do it.”
“I know.” And that knowledge was eating Dean alive.
“I wonder if... if we’ll remember when it happens. If we’ll know.”
“I hope not,” Dean whispered.
“John. John. Wake up, son.”
John woke with a start to find himself in the same bedroom in the bunker as he’d seen in his dream, but instead of Dean sitting beside him, it was Pops shaking him awake. He had a vague memory of stumbling in early that morning (or was it?), but he didn’t remember falling asleep.
But he didn’t have time to dwell on it, because the next words out of Pops’ mouth were, “How old did you say your boys are?”
“Um.” John’s voice was rough with sleep, and his mind wasn’t too clear yet, but he thought he remembered the right answer. “Eight an’ four?”
“Come on. There’s a story coming up on the news you need to see.”
“C’n I have some coffee?” John asked as Pops dragged him to his feet.
“Already waiting, Sport. C’mon.”
John felt like death warmed over, to be honest. The first trial had done a number on him, but it hadn’t been this bad. His fever had risen, he thought, and all he really wanted to do was sleep. But the newscast got his pulse going faster than the caffeine did when they went to a commercial break with, “Coming up next: A sudden outbreak of a mysterious illness is affecting four-year-olds nationwide. Could your child be at risk? Stay tuned.”
John swore.
Pops nodded. “That’s why I woke you.”
“Thanks.”
John guzzled his coffee during the break and was on the edge of his seat while the reporter chronicled the eerily similar cases of Max Miller, Jake Talley, and Ava Wilson, none of whom had anything in common except a cough that had started producing blood and a fever that had spiked—all at exactly the same time. Doctors were baffled by the outbreak. “There’s no common point of contact or any clear vector for this disease,” one expert said. “A number of the children were exposed to smoke from a house fire when they were six months old, but even there, there’s no clear correlation....”
John flung himself out of the room and to the nearest telephone.
Ellen picked up on the first ring. “Oh, John, thank God,” she nearly sobbed when he identified himself. “Bill didn’t have a number where we could reach you.”
“I just saw the news about the kids coughing up blood.”
“Sammy’s one of them. They’re calling him Patient Zero, in fact, as if he started the whole thing. They had to Lifeflight him to Omaha last night.”
“Omaha, Omaha—Children’s Hospital?”
“Right. Bill’s there with Dean, and Jim and Bobby are on their way, if they’re not already there. Where are you?”
“Lebanon still. Again.” Dammit, he needed more coffee.
And Ellen could tell. “John, are you all right?”
“Yeah, yeah, just... second trial took a lot out of me. Look, I’ll get Pops and get out there as quick as we can.”
“Okay. Want me to call and let them know you’re coming?”
“That’d be good, thanks.”
“Four hours?”
“Make it five, ’case we have to stop.”
“Good thinking. I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks, Ellen. We’ll be in touch.” And John hung up.
When he got back to the main lobby, he spotted Pops standing in the middle of the library, looking lost. “Healing texts,” Pops thought aloud as John approached. “Surely there’s a section of healing texts in here somewhere.” He went to a random shelf and picked out a book to start flipping through.
John mentally scanned through the list of allies that the boys had sent back with the trial description and hit on a plan before Pops could realize he was looking at the wrong book. Then John went to the card catalogue, found the card he needed, and headed toward a different shelf.
Pops looked up, confused. “Aren’t those the summoning texts?”
“Yup. Do me a favor? Call Directory Assistance and find out if there’s a Hindu temple in Omaha.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, Pops.” John found the book he wanted and brought it to the table, then went to find a pen and some paper.
By the time he got back, Pops was finishing up on the phone. “No temple,” he reported, “but I did find a guru who gave me coordinates for a good place to perform a summoning.”
“Awesome.” John found the summoning he needed, copied it down, and handed it to Pops. “Here’s what we need.”
Pops looked even more confused but nodded. “I should be able to find all of this in the lab. But why—”
“Pops. Trust me.”
“All right. Go eat while I gather everything.”
John’s stomach rebelled at the thought of food, but he did go to the kitchen to fill a travel mug with coffee. He forced himself to eat a banana, too, just so he could say he had.
He was just throwing the peel away when Pops came in with a satchel. “All right, we’re set. Let’s go.”
John nodded and grabbed his travel mug. “Hospital first.”
“Of course. Best to know what we’re dealing with first-hand.”
John drove as far as he could, but he barely made it to the Platte River before he had to pull over and trade places with Pops.
Visiting hours were long since over by the time they arrived at the hospital, but when Bill came down to confirm that John was Sammy’s father and that Henry was kin, the staff let them in to see Sammy. Dean was sitting in the ICU waiting room with a nurse and trying to watch TV when Bill led them that far, but he gasped when he saw John and ran to hug him.
“Dad!” The exclamation was just shy of a sob. “You’re here!”
“Came as soon as I could, son,” John replied, returning the hug.
Dean held on for a moment, then backed away. “Dad, are you okay?”
“Be a lot better when I know what’s going on here. Tell me what happened.”
“You’d been gone ten days or so when Sammy started coughing in the middle of the night. We all thought it was just a cold at first, but it didn’t get better. So Ellen took him to the doctor, and he said he’d coughed up a little blood. The doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so he just gave Sammy some cough medicine. And th-then last night... all of a sudden, it got worse. A lot worse. He couldn’t stop coughing, and it was bloody, and he had a real bad fever, and... and they had to bring him here, and they still don’t know what’s wrong.”
Pops stepped forward. “What time did the change occur?”
Dean looked from Pops to John in confusion.
“It’s okay, Dean,” John said quietly, so the nurse couldn’t quite overhear. “This is your Grandpa Henry. He’s cool.”
Dean sighed and looked away as he thought. “I... I don’t remember. Late, like maybe midnight.”
John’s sense of time was still skewed, but Pops looked grave enough that John suspected that was about the time he completed the second trial. He sighed. “Okay. Take me to him.”
The nurse stood at that point. “Mr. Winchester, if you yourself are ill—”
“Chemo,” John and Dean interrupted at the same time.
“It’s an experimental treatment I’m undergoing at MD Anderson,” John continued. “I just got the second round, but I had to come check on my son. There’s no risk of contagion on my part.”
The nurse sighed. “All right, but we can’t expose you to any infectious diseases, either.”
“Is there evidence that Sammy’s contagious?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Then let me see my son.”
Pops cleared his throat. “Ma’am, I’m not only the boys’ relative; I also work for the CDC. Perhaps my division would be able to locate a treatment better if I could send a first-hand report.”
The nurse sighed. “All right. This way.”
Dean grabbed John’s hand and held it all the way into the ICU unit where Sammy was staying. Poor Sammy was barely visible amid the cooling blankets and wires and tubes, but he didn’t look much better than John felt. He snuffled miserably and coughed once as John gently brushed his hair back from his forehead, and then a major coughing fit hit. John clamped a tissue over Sammy’s mouth to catch any blood that might go flying, tried not to grimace when something hot and sticky did hit the tissue, and rubbed Sammy’s back until the fit passed. By the end of it, Dean had plastered himself to John’s side.
Sammy’s eyes fluttered open as John helped him to lie back again. “Dad?” he whispered hoarsely.
“I’m here, kiddo,” John whispered back. “I’ll find a way to fix this, I swear.”
Sammy smiled. “Knew you’d come. Love you.” And he was asleep again—and John had a moment of bizarre double vision, with the image before him overlaid by the image of grown-up Sam falling asleep in the bunker. The two images even coughed at the same time.
But why was Sammy suffering now when John was the one doing the trials?
“Dad?” Dean prompted. “You okay?”
John nodded, folded up the bloody tissue, and tucked it into his pocket. “I’ll be all right. Look, Pops and I need to go do something, make some calls, but we’ll be back soon.”
“How soon?”
“Couple of hours, maybe. Before daylight, for sure. I’m not leaving town until Sammy’s better.”
Dean relaxed a little. “Okay.”
John gave Dean another hug and rubbed Sammy’s shoulder once more, and then he tore himself away and left with Pops.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, John,” Pops said quietly as they rode the elevator back down to the lobby.
“I do,” John replied. “I just hope it works. Nice save on the CDC cover, by the way.”
“I do—did—have credentials from most of the major agencies. Never asked whether they were real or not. I have no idea where they are, though, and even if I did, they’d be woefully out of date.”
“Hell, if you need ’em, Bobby can get you fixed up.”
“Let’s hope I don’t.”
Pops drove to the coordinates the guru had given him, which turned out to be a vacant lot on the west side of town. Then he hung back to watch the car while John performed the summoning. John thus couldn’t see Pops’ reaction when the petite dark-skinned goddess in the red sari appeared on the far side of the summoning bowl.
“What?” she asked flatly, arms crossed.
“Sorry to disturb you, Kali-Ma,” John answered. “I’m looking for Loki, and I hear you know him better than most.”
Kali raised one eyebrow. “And why do you seek Loki?”
“My son is ill. I understand he can help me find a cure.”
She raised her other eyebrow and began circling him, studying him from head to toe. He stood his ground and pretended not to be aware of how her gaze penetrated to his very soul. After she’d made one complete circuit, she walked up to him, studied his face, and then suddenly swiped nails like tiger claws across his cheek. It drew blood, but he didn’t flinch.
She looked at the blood on her fingers, then smiled at him. “Because you hate demons as much as I do, I will do this for you. Wait.” And she vanished.
He swayed briefly, surprised at the effort it had taken to withstand her scrutiny. But by the time he’d taken a deep breath and let it out again, she had returned, her two left hands holding the ear and arm of a white male with slicked-back brown hair and hazel eyes. Said male, who was presumably Loki, was attempting unsuccessfully to twist out of her grasp.
“Kali, what the hells—OW!” Loki yelped as she swiped at him with one left hand the way she’d swiped at John. “What was that for?!”
She didn’t answer, simply pressed the blood-coated fingertips of her left and right hands together. There was a flash, and John got a brief glimpse of chains made of light binding him to her captive, whom she then released.
“What was that for?” Loki repeated, exasperated.
“He needs your help, Loki,” she stated mildly. “I simply made sure you would give it.” She licked the blood off her right index finger as if it were chocolate, and John felt the gashes in his cheek close and disappear. Then she stepped up to him again. “I don’t know how much any blessing I can give will help you now, but you have it for whatever it is worth. The rest is in your hands.”
John nodded slowly. “Thank you, Kali.”
She nodded back and left.
Loki huffed. “You are looney tunes, you know that? Not only do you look to a Trickster for help, but you get a guy’s ex involved—”
“Gabriel,” John interrupted.
Loki froze with his mouth open, then shut it.
“Never mind how I know who you are. I’m pretty sure you know who I am. I started trying to close the gates of Hell in order to save my sons. I was fine with giving my life for them. But now these trials are killing both me and my son, along with a lot of other kids his age, and I need to know how to fix that.”
Loki—Gabriel—chuckled nervously. “That, my friend, is way above my pay grade. If you think I’m getting involved, think again. I’m l—” He turned as if to disappear, but the light chains appeared again and pulled him back.
John grabbed Gabriel by the scruff of the neck. “You’re not going anywhere except with me. Move it.”
Gabriel spluttered and squirmed but had no choice but to let John drag him to the car and all but throw him into the back seat.
“That’s who you were after?” Pops asked, surprised, as John slammed the back door shut.
“Pops, just drive,” John groaned and jogged around to the passenger side.
Gabriel was silent all the way back to the hospital and into Sammy’s room, where Pops did a quick song and dance to convince the staff that Gabriel was one of his CDC coworkers. But barely had John sat back down at Sammy’s bedside than Sammy had another coughing fit, worse than before. When it was over, John felt as exhausted as Sammy looked.
He turned to Gabriel, whose sullen expression had faded into something closer to worry. “I don’t even know what’s wrong with him,” he whispered, unable to keep a pleading note out of his voice. “The trials are causing it, but....”
Gabriel sighed. “It’s probably the demon blood.”
John blinked several times. “Demon blood?”
Gabriel nodded. “See, Lucifer had this plan. Long story short, he was looking for a special child who would grow up to release him from Hell and then consent to be his vessel.”
“Vessel? You mean—”
“Yeah, possession. Angels are limited to certain bloodlines and have to get consent. You should—well, no, you don’t remember, but you’re Michael’s vessel in your generation. Dean is Mike’s vessel in his generation, and Sam, unfortunately, is supposed to be Lucifer’s, since he’s your second son. But Luci couldn’t say that to Azazel, so he left his instructions vague. And Azazel made a bunch of deals without telling anyone that the fine print allowed him to feed his blood to a deal-victim’s six-month-old child, so the child’s body would produce trace amounts of demon blood and presumably be primed to house Luci when the time came.”
John ran a hand over his face. “And one of the deals was with Mary. That’s why he was in our house.”
“Bingo.”
“So now all those children are... are coughing up the demon blood?”
“That’s my guess.”
John carded his fingers through Sammy’s hair and thought back to the vision of his grown sons, to Missouri sobbing and refusing to tell him why, and wondered whether the potential possession by Lucifer had any part to play in the many things she’d said he didn’t want to know. Then he looked up at Gabriel again. “If... if I finish this... would Sammy be safe?”
Gabriel pursed his lips. “Hard to tell. Shutting down the Pit would derail the plan as it stands now. There is a second method of opening the Cage that Lucifer may or may not know exists. I do know that he doesn’t know exactly what it is. I don’t know if Mike’s so sold on the destiny gag that he’d decide to open the Cage himself, or if any of my other idiot brothers would try to manipulate the boys into doing it for them.”
“But if we can cure Sammy of the demon blood....”
“Then Luci would be without a permanent vessel. He might still try to take Sam, but Sam wouldn’t survive it. And if there’s one thing I know about my brother, it’s that he hates being denied a chew toy that would last him a while.”
John took a deep breath and let it out again. “Do you know of a cure?”
Gabriel held up his hands. “Hey, whoa. I’m a messenger, not a doctor, and I’m kind of in Witness Protection these days. And I’m guessing we really don’t want Mike or Rapha involved right now.”
Sammy coughed and shifted, which caused the IV drip to rattle and catch John’s eye. And suddenly John had a plan.
He went to the door and called softly for Pops, who was standing in the hall. “Where’s Bill?”
“Out in the waiting room with Dean. You need him?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Pops nodded, left, and returned with Bill. “You got something?” Bill asked.
“Pretty sure. But I need Jim.”
Bill understood that completely the wrong way and paled. “John, don’t you dare—”
“Not for last rites! I need him!”
“Why?”
“Dammit, Harvelle, just get him here!”
Bill threw up his hands in surrender and headed to the nurses’ station.
Gabriel frowned. “What are you thinking?”
But Pops, having read all of the notes about the trials, was two steps ahead of Gabriel. “You’re sure that will work for this?”
John shrugged. “What else have we got? Besides, I’ll need to anyway for the third trial.”
“But if Sammy’s not possessed....”
“No, no, not the whole shebang.”
“John, be careful. Josie was there for the first attempt in ’57, the one that backfired so horribly. She said it scared her spitless, and she could have handled almost anything. Well, except Abaddon.”
John shook his head. “It won’t come to that. Not this way. Not with Sammy.”
Gabriel had caught on and nodded. “I think you’re right. And like you said, what else have we got?”
Pops looked from John to Gabriel and back and sighed. “Well. Guess I know what the next entry in my journal will be. And I guess I’ll have to stick around to see how it comes out.”
John smiled. “Thanks, Pops.” And he went back to sit with Sammy until Jim arrived.
Dean came to the door several minutes later. “Dad? Pastor Jim’s here.”
John stood with a groan. “All right, son. Thanks. Why don’t you watch Sammy for me while I go talk with Pastor Jim?”
“’Kay.” Dean came over to take the chair John had just vacated.
John squeezed Dean’s shoulder and went out to the waiting room, where Jim was standing talking with Bill.
“John,” Jim said as John walked up. “Bill said it was urgent. What’s going on?”
“We’d better do this in the chapel,” John replied.
Jim blinked. “The chapel? Why?”
“I’ve got a confession to make.”
Jim’s eyes widened, and he grabbed John’s arm. “All right, then. Come on.”
“Be right back,” John told Bill as Jim hustled him to the elevator.
On the way down to the chapel, Jim sighed. “John, are you sure now’s the time?”
“I’m not starting the third trial yet,” John explained. “If I need to, I’ll get you to hear my confession again when it is time. But if repeated doses of purified blood can cure a full-fledged demon, one dose ought to cure a human kid infected with demon blood, right?”
Jim inclined his head in understanding. “That would be logical, yes.”
“Assuming this works, we can put the word out, get teams of hunters to treat the rest of the kids before I start the last trial.”
“What I don’t understand is why more children than just Sammy were affected.”
“Long story.”
“Those notes made it sound like only the person who had attempted the trials was affected this way.”
John sighed. “Can’t be sure, but... my guess is, he was the only one left.”
“But—but there are dozens, maybe hundreds. How could they all have died?”
“Like Missouri said. We don’t want to know.”
Jim sighed and let the question drop. “Now, remind me. Have you been baptized?”
“As a baby, yeah, I think so. Sort of remember going through Confirmation.”
“All right. Confession and Absolution it is, then.”
They reached the chapel then and, finding it empty, sat down on the front two pews, with Jim turned around to face John. Jim flipped through his prayer book to find what he needed.
“Kinda... don’t know where to start,” John admitted.
“That’s what the liturgy is for,” Jim replied with a kind smile and turned the book around so John could read.
“Please hear my confession,” John began reading, “and pronounce forgiveness in order to fulfill God's will. I, a poor sinner, plead guilty before God of all sins. I have lived as if God did not matter and as if I mattered most. My Lord’s name I have not honored as I should; my worship and prayers have faltered.” This was getting uncomfortably close to home, but he pressed on, even with his voice wavering a little, because Sammy needed him to. “I have not let His love have its way with me, and so my love for others has failed. There are those whom I have hurt, and those whom I have failed to help.” Then his voice gave out on him completely, and he broke down and wept.
Jim rubbed his shoulder. “Keep going, John. No one’s going to hear this except God and me. Get it all out.”
And John did. Every time he’d failed Mary and the boys, every time he’d messed up a hunt or been too slow to respond, every time he hadn’t questioned orders in ’Nam and should have, every time he had questioned orders and shouldn’t have, every time he’d cheated on a test or treated a girl badly, all the years he’d hated Pops for what he now knew were unjust reasons, all of it came tumbling out in a rush of words he wasn’t even sure made sense. Finally, after he’d faltered to a stop, he followed Jim’s finger and read, “I am s-sorry for all of this and ask for grace. I w-want to do better.”
Jim didn’t even look at the book for the next part. Instead, he looked John in the eye as he recited, “God be merciful to you and strengthen your faith. Do you believe that my forgiveness is God’s forgiveness?”
John stifled another sob and nodded.
“In the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ, I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son”—here Jim made the sign of the cross over John—“and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Go in peace.”
“Amen,” John echoed hoarsely and nearly collapsed in exhaustion.
Jim caught him. “Hey, hey, hey. Let’s get you to a bed.”
John shook his head. “Nuh-uh. No time. Sammy needs me.”
Muttering prayers under his breath, Jim hauled John to his feet and back to the elevator. John was steady enough to stand and walk on his own by the time they got back to ICU, but Jim accompanied John to Sammy’s room, probably to make sure John didn’t fall over. Pops took their arrival as his cue to wheedle an empty syringe out of the nurses, and Jim followed Gabriel’s lead in insisting that the treatment they were attempting was classified and barring the nurses from following John and Pops into Sammy’s room.
“Okay, Dean,” John sighed quietly once they were inside. “Is there a barf bucket or something handy?”
Dean looked around and found an emesis basin, which he jumped up to grab and bring back to the bed while John sat down.
“Good. Dunno how this will work, so we may need that. Stand by.”
“Yes, sir,” Dean said seriously.
“Pops?”
Pops handed John the syringe and reminded him of how much to use. John nodded, rolled up his left sleeve, and drew the right amount from a vein. Then he pulled Sammy’s cooling blanket down enough to find a vein in the boy’s neck.
“I’m sorry if this hurts, Sammy,” he whispered, even though Sammy seemed to be asleep. Then, as gently as he could, he slid the needle into the vein and injected the blood.
Nothing happened for several seconds, during which time Pops took the syringe from John and dropped it in the sharps disposal. But then Sammy’s heart rate sped up, and he started breathing harder, as if he were fighting nausea. Dean pushed the emesis basin under Sammy’s chin just before Sammy sat bolt upright and vomited several times, bringing up blood each time but the last. But as the heaves subsided and Sammy relaxed backward against John’s hand and arm, all of his numbers improved drastically—heart rate, respiration, even temperature. His breathing eased, and the fine sweat of a broken fever appeared on his forehead as his color returned to normal.
“I think that did it,” Pops breathed. “You were right, John.”
Sammy took a deep breath, let it out again, and opened his eyes. Then he gasped. “Dad!”
“Hey, Champ,” John replied with a smile. “Feeling better?”
“I feel great!”
John didn’t give a damn at that moment about wires or tubes or anything. He just gathered his baby boy into a tight hug. “Thank God,” he breathed. “Thank God.”
Sammy hummed happily and returned the hug for a moment. Then he pushed at John’s chest as if wanting distance. “Dad, you’re hot. Are you okay?”
No, he wasn’t okay, but he wasn’t going to say so. He just let Sammy go and braced himself on the side rail of the bed. “Just... just need a moment....”
“Dad?” both boys asked.
“Sammy’s okay. That’s... tha’s wha’....” He was vaguely aware that he was slipping out of the chair, but he blacked out completely before he could hit the ground.
