A Time to Seek 4/6
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Chapter 4
Tarvek was seething quietly by the time the lights of the Chicago metroplex finally became visible against the darkening horizon Saturday evening. The fact that the weather and the traffic had put them a good two hours behind schedule had only worsened his mood, which hadn’t been great when they’d left Lebanon before dawn that morning to begin with. Hitting the Campbell compound under cover of darkness had been the plan all along, of course, but it was damp and cold and only going to get colder. And aside from the inherent misery of dealing with the elements, which was going to be necessary because Tarvek was supposed to stand guard and Henry had said the Campbells’ underground archive was under a barn, the state of the weather actually justified the Winchesters’ insistence that the Murphys look the part by wearing blue-collar hunter chic.
He, Aaron Travis Sturmvoraus Murphy, who had very nearly minored in fashion design while at Stanford, was wearing blue jeans and plaid flannel, plus steel-toed work boots, thick woolen socks, a sturdy fleece-lined jacket, and a stocking cap. Violetta had already had something that would work, and Colette had been able to borrow from Zeetha and Agatha, but Tarvek had resisted borrowing at all, so Dean and Gil had unceremoniously dragged him down to the Lebanon feed store—the feed store!!—and hadn’t let him leave until he’d purchased the hideous outfit he had on now. At least Dean had conceded that contacts wouldn’t raise any eyebrows, so Tarvek hadn’t had to make matters worse by finding a cheap pair of glasses. Gil had even had the gall to maintain that these clothes were practical... and now the weather was proving him right, blast it all.
“Jealous, dear?” Colette asked in French with a gently teasing smile.
“Jealous?” Tarvek echoed in the same language. “Why?”
“Because we’re here and you’re not back in the bunker working on robots with Agatha.”
“Oh, that. I forgot.” And he had, honestly. Over supper the night before, Agatha had come up with the idea for two classes of robots to deploy in Sinclair’s mansion: scout bots for scanning and cataloging everything from artifacts to lab contents, and explosive bots for clearing rooms in the menagerie. She’d had plans drafted by the time the abduction party returned from the feed store, and she’d been hard at work on prototypes by the time the Murphys had left that morning. Tarvek did have his own idea for a handheld medical scanner that he wanted to work on after they finished this job, but it really wasn’t the same type of gadget Agatha was working on, and he’d said so from the start. Knowing Agatha, the lab she used would be swarming with tiny bots by now, and he probably wouldn’t be able to think with all that commotion driving him to distraction. “Besides,” he continued aloud, “it’s still rather awkward trying to work with Agatha on anything.”
Colette blinked. “With or without Gil there?”
“Yes. Both. It’s not as bad anymore in a social setting, and we are good friends, but... there are some things I can’t forget.”
“You mean things your father told you about her birth mother?”
“Well, that, yes, but also... he wanted me to marry her.”
“What?! After he ensured that her possession by Lucrezia was fully successful?!”
“I know, I know. I think it was mostly to keep up appearances, make everything look legal. How the hell that was supposed to work when she was nine, I have no idea. He said something about not minding sharing with me, though, and something else that sounded like he thought maybe Lucrezia could hand control back to Agatha sometimes so Agatha would be ‘mine’ and Lucrezia would be ‘his’—I don’t even know anymore. He was usually high enough that he didn’t remember that he had only a few years left before his deal came due. The point is, even though I was never really in love with her, I just... it’s awkward, that’s all.”
Before Colette could respond, a quiet “Yahtzee!” from the back seat interrupted the conversation.
“You have spent entirely too much time around Sam,” Tarvek remarked in English.
“Shut up,” Violetta shot back. “I have not. You know John’s always been afraid I’d turn on him.”
Colette shifted to look back at Violetta more directly. “Have you found us a cover story?”
“Boy, have I ever.” Violetta carefully handed Colette her laptop. “I think this is one you guys will actually need to take. It’s in St. Louis.”
Tarvek frowned. “What is it?”
“String of murders with similar MOs, all within a ten-mile radius: woman found in a chair, bound and gagged and beaten to death. Husband or boyfriend—or girlfriend in a couple of cases—is arrested for the murder but claims to have been somewhere else, usually with witnesses, even though security camera footage places the accused at the scene at the time of the murder.”
“A doppelgänger?”
“I’m thinking shapeshifter, but you’ll probably have to get access to the surveillance footage to be sure. Papa Jim told me one time you can tell a shifter from a human by the way the light reflects off the retina into the camera; a shifter’s eyes flare silver, not red like a human’s.”
“So why do you think we specifically need to take this one?”
“The most recent case, just last night,” Colette answered, reading the page that was open on Violetta’s laptop. “This says, ‘The victim’s boyfriend, Zachary Warren, 24, was arrested and charged with the murder. Warren claims to have been at his parents’ house with his sister, Rebecca, who was to have returned to school in California today.’”
Tarvek blinked. “Wait, that’s... Becky and Zach, Sam’s friends? The same Becky Jess stayed with right after the attack?”
“Oui. They came to a few Adventure Club parties with Sam, I think.”
“They did,” Violetta confirmed. “One of them was a time when I’d come to visit you guys. That’s how I recognized Zach’s mugshot in the news story.”
Tarvek nodded. “Right. I remember talking with Zach a few times. Even with a few of Theo’s cocktails in him, he wasn’t a violent sort. I definitely can’t picture him beating his girlfriend to death.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a moment. “We’ve never hunted a shapeshifter before. It might be worth seeing what lore the Campbells have so we don’t go in unprepared.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to call the Winchesters?”
Tarvek shook his head. “No, you know Sam. He’ll want to handle it personally, and Dean won’t be able to convince him to let us take it so they can stay under cover. Sam’s liable to forget that hex bags don’t protect against human eyes, and we have no idea where Zola is or whether Azazel has other humans working for him.” There was also the unresolved sartorial issue, which would come up again if Sam and Dean met them in St. Louis, but Tarvek wasn’t going to say anything about that right now. “I can call Theo to get contact info for Becky, but it’s better if we don’t say anything to the Winchesters until the hunt’s over.”
Colette raised an eyebrow, but all she said was, “All right.”
They stopped in Joliet for gas and supper, during which Violetta gave them an initial briefing on the area where the crimes were occurring, a historic neighborhood called Hyde Park. From there, it was another four hours to the Campbell compound outside of Lansing, which was time enough for Violetta to do further digging into the facts of the case. “It’s looking more and more like a shapeshifter,” she reported as Tarvek finally turned off the highway and tried not to worry about the snowflakes drifting past the headlights. “Each of the houses where a murder occurred had been burglarized shortly beforehand—a week, usually. Only clothing was taken in each burglary. The police think it’s just a coincidence, maybe someone coming out from downtown or crossing the river from East St. Louis looking for a quick score; Hyde Park’s not more than a few miles from either area, so that’s easy enough walking distance if a crook’s determined to go there. But the burglar somehow always manages not to get caught by security cameras, while the killer somehow always does.”
“Sounds like a deliberate frame-up,” Tarvek mused. “Not that it didn’t already, but surely a homeowner knows where his or her security cameras are better than a random schlub from another town and would be just as anxious, if not more so, to avoid them if the alibi being claimed is to hold up. But now I’m wondering why that hasn’t occurred to the police.”
“The prime suspect’s always caught inside the house, and the killer’s never recorded leaving the house. Plus, most of the residents in Hyde Park are African-American.”
“Ahhh,” Tarvek and Colette chorused. As an interracial couple, they understood the implications all too well.
Just then, a row of dusk-to-dawn lights perpendicular to the road became visible, recalling the Murphys’ attention to the task at hand. They reviewed their plan of action one last time, so when the car turned in at the drive and stopped at the gate, they all had their most innocent, disarming smiles ready to turn on the two guards with submachine guns who immediately approached the car while Tarvek rolled down the windows.
“Evening,” Tarvek called to the guard who came around to the driver’s window. “Our name is Murphy; we’re friends of Sam Winchester’s. He suggested we come here for research help.”
“Research?” the guard echoed suspiciously.
“Yes, you see, we’re investigating a possible shapeshifter attack in St. Louis, and Sam thought your family might have more information than his immediate family currently has access to.”
“I’ll need to see some identification.”
“Yes, of course.”
Tarvek reached into his pocket at the same time Colette reached into hers. Together they recited a short Enochian phrase, raised and opened their hands, and blew chamomile into the guards’ faces. By the time the guards hit the ground unconscious, Violetta was already out of the back seat and picking the lock on the gate; Tarvek and Colette got out to drag the guards out of harm’s way, and Violetta opened the gate. Tarvek then jumped back in the car to drive into the compound and park while Colette ran through on foot and helped Violetta close and lock the gate again. Then, sticking to the shadows as much as possible, they converged on one of the ramshackle buildings behind what looked like a large livestock barn. Violetta checked for signs of an alarm system, and finding none, she made short work of opening the latch of one of the windows and then the window itself. All three of them climbed inside as quickly as possible, and Violetta shut and locked the window again.
Colette shone a red LED light around the room, revealing it to be a roughed-in office space with walls of bare board and corrugated metal; there were shelves, a bulletin board, and a worn desk and ’70s-vintage desk chair, but the wooden walls had gaps between the boards, and the metal door had rust spots. Tarvek tried the handle as gently as possible and found that it turned easily, but a slight tug encountered resistance, which meant the door had to be padlocked from the outside. Violetta stamped quietly on the floor until she found a spot that sounded hollow under the desk, so the three of them moved the desk out of the way, and Colette set about finding the latch to lift while Tarvek turned his own attention to getting a length of wire through a gap near the door and into the padlock. He was just starting the fiddly process of picking the lock when he heard the girls climb down the ladder into the archive behind him—he was sure the sound wouldn’t travel far, but metal ladders were almost impossible to descend silently.
Actually picking the lock didn’t take terribly long, although it would have gone faster if Tarvek had had a magnet capable of keeping the lock still despite the door. Getting the lock off the latch and getting the latch open, all without making much noise or leaving scratches anywhere, was harder. (It should have been impossible if the office had been properly constructed, but clearly the Campbells had staked all their security on the two guards at the gate, the mundane appearance of the buildings, and whatever wards there might be about the place. Tarvek strongly disapproved.) He managed to get the door open in the end, however, and slipped out of the office to wait and keep watch. There were windows in the outside wall that let in enough light for him to see tolerably well, so he split his time between watching for motion outside and watching for motion inside.
It wasn’t many minutes more before he heard a slight noise, turned, and found himself at the business end of a shotgun. The light spilling in from outside revealed the person holding the gun to be a round-faced young man with fair hair and beard, a stony expression, and steely blue eyes. His ability to get this close without alerting Tarvek to his presence meant that he must be a very good hunter indeed.
“Ah!” Tarvek exclaimed, reasonably sure the other man couldn’t see past him to know that the padlock was in his pocket and not on the door. “Thank goodness you’ve finally turned up, Mr. Campbell. It is Mr. Campbell, isn’t it?”
“Mark,” said the other man.
“Mark? Nice to meet you. My name’s Murphy, Aaron Murphy. Sam Winchester sent me.” When that garnered no reaction at all, Tarvek tried again. “Mary’s son? Mary Campbell? Samuel’s daughter? I-I think you and Sam must be cousins....”
“Fifth cousin, twice removed.”
“Ah, really? What an interesting family you have.”
Mark Campbell didn’t even twitch.
“The reason I’m here,” Tarvek plowed on, hoping he didn’t sound desperate, “is to get some information about shapeshifters. There’s a case in St. Louis that my partners and I think may be a shapeshifter that’s gone serial, but we’ve never tried to hunt a shapeshifter before, so we don’t even know where to start looking—”
“Sewers.”
“Pardon?”
Campbell just blinked, as if to say, You heard me.
“It... may be living in the sewers? Is that what you mean?”
Campbell nodded once.
Score another one for Winchester/Wulfenbach ingenuity; at least Tarvek wouldn’t have to get anything else grubby if they had to go crawling through a sewer system, and he’d have the perfect excuse to salt and burn this outfit if the smell didn’t come out. “How will we know when we’re close to its lair, though? I mean, the smell won’t exactly....”
“Skin.”
“Skin. It... it sheds its skin when it shifts?!”
Campbell nodded once.
“That’s... rather disgusting. All right. Uh, is there any special ammunition or....”
“Silver.”
“Silver bullets.”
Campbell nodded once and pointed the shotgun at Tarvek’s heart.
Tarvek startled back several steps, hands raised, before he realized. “Oh. Silver bullet to the heart.”
Campbell nodded again, more deeply, as if to say, Now you’re catching on.
“Got it. R-right, well, is... is there any further information we need, or....”
Campbell shook his head.
“Uh, okay, well, I did promise to wait here for my partners—”
“Oh, there you are!” Violetta called from behind Campbell, distracting him just long enough that Tarvek could get the padlock back on the door and grab another handful of chamomile out of his pocket. “Any luck?”
“Yes, actually,” Tarvek replied. “Mr. Campbell here has very graciously given me all the information he thinks we need. So thank you very much, Mark, and....” He recited the spell again and blew chamomile in Campbell’s face, and Campbell went down without a sound.
“Colette’s gone to get the gate,” Violetta reported as she and Tarvek raced out of the building to the car. “Did he really....”
“Yeah, all four words of it,” Tarvek replied. “But that should be enough. You?”
“Got the journal microfilmed and took overview pictures of everything else. That’ll save us some time if we have to come back. They didn’t have much, though, at least not compared to Mr. Singer and the bunker library.”
They jumped in the car and drove through the opened gate, then stopped while Colette shut and locked the gate again and got back in the car. Yet Tarvek didn’t relax until they were safely back on the highway and had been neither followed nor fired upon. Just to be extra safe, once they got well into Lansing itself, they took adjacent rooms in a three-star hotel under the surname of Voltaire, and Colette did all the talking and put the rooms on one of the few credit cards she had left from before their marriage. But nobody crashed in on them at any point during the night, which was a good thing considering the way Colette chose to warm Tarvek up and take the edge off his anxiety and annoyance—an effective way, but one that did leave a person rather vulnerable.
Things were going too smoothly, Tarvek thought glumly when the alarm went off just a few hours later. In fact, he was so convinced that something was about to go disastrously wrong that it was almost a relief to go down to the continental breakfast and hear the weather news people on the TV discussing a massive lake-effect snowstorm that had walloped the south shore of Lake Michigan overnight, shutting down all but emergency traffic on I-94 and I-90. The main reason it wasn’t entirely a relief was that the only way to get from Lansing to Blue Earth in a reasonable amount of time was over that very route, and he said as much as they ate.
“Isn’t there any alternative?” Colette asked.
Tarvek shook his head. “Not one that wouldn’t add at least another half-day to our drive time. We’d probably have to go all the way down to Indianapolis to hit a safe alternate route, and by that point, we’d be halfway to St. Louis already.”
Violetta’s eyes widened, then turned into high-beam puppy eyes.
“You have been spending too much time with Sam!” Tarvek grouched.
“Please, Trav?” she pleaded, mindful of the fact that they weren’t alone in the breakfast room. “As late as we’d be getting in, I’d be too exhausted to go to class tomorrow anyway, and you might not be able to get back to St. Louis before Tuesday night, which could... well, you know.” Could mean the shifter would have time to strike again remained unspoken. “If I go with you, we could rent me a car tomorrow morning, or maybe Papa Jim could meet us and take me home himself.”
“She does have a point,” Colette said quietly, more to her coffee than to him.
Tarvek sighed heavily. “Oh, all right. You email your professors when we get back to the room; I’ll call Papa Jim, and Colette can call Theo.”
Colette swallowed her sip of coffee and shook her head. “Not this early, cheri. You forget the time difference.”
“Shoot, you’re right. What time does his ICU shift start?”
“Mm, not until 8:00, I think. And we are three hours ahead, so....”
Violetta blinked. “Wait, you know who you should call? Van!”
Colette lit up. “But of course! Van knows everybody. I’ll text and also ask him to have Papa Jim call us when Sam can’t overhear.”
“Now ain’t that interesting?” a female voice drawled behind Tarvek, its tone consisting of equal parts suspicion and sarcasm.
Tarvek didn’t turn around; he’d known the two people standing behind his chair had been listening from a nearby table but hadn’t been sure who they were until now. “Won’t you join us, Miss Campbell?”
“Not until you answer some questions, Murphy, or whatever the hell your name is.”
“My name is Murphy, and it’s difficult to have a conversation like this. I presume that’s Mark beside you?”
The stolid silence that greeted that question spoke for itself.
“If Sam Winchester really sent you,” Miss Campbell pressed, “why are you so anxious for him not to know you’re here?”
“He knows we’re here,” Colette corrected. “He doesn’t know that the latest incident involves a friend of his. And he is currently engaged with another case that he can’t drop—to leave now for the sake of his friend could be fatal, but we wouldn’t be able to convince him of that.”
“How do you mean, fatal?”
“Catastrophic,” Violetta answered. “Apocalyptic, even.”
There was a pause, and then the tall, dark-haired, fair-skinned woman he’d seen out the corner of his eye stalked around the table and sat down across from Tarvek, still on her guard. Mark seemingly stayed where he was.
“What did you take last night?” Miss Campbell demanded quietly.
“Nothing,” Tarvek stated, which was technically true.
“So what the hell did you come for?”
“Information.”
“Like hell you did. Even if I buy the case, which I don’t, there are hunters closer to St. Louis than this.”
“Yes, but apparently my cousin here is the only one who’s looked at the deaths closely enough to discern the pattern. And we have it on good authority that only your family had the precise information we needed, not only for our own case, but also for Sam’s.”
“Information about what?”
“The Colt.”
Mark snorted, and Miss Campbell scoffed. “The Colt don’t exist,” she declared, “and even if it did, we don’t have it.”
Tarvek settled back in his seat and crossed his arms. “I never said you did. I said we needed information.”
“Who told you we had any? Sam sure as hell couldn’t know about that; his old man’s a loose cannon, and we ain’t workin’ with him. And for that matter, where’d you get whatever sleep spell you used on Mark?”
“The answer to both questions is the same: the Men of Letters.”
Miss Campbell’s jaw dropped. “Who the hell do you think you’re kidding?” she whispered harshly. “The Men of Letters are dead.”
“Were dead,” Colette corrected again. “One of them came back.”
Miss Campbell looked like she was about to protest again, but Tarvek intervened. “Look, Miss Campbell—”
“Gwen,” Gwen interrupted sharply.
“Let me give you some friendly advice, Gwen. Mark did us a good turn last night, and I’d like to make up for knocking him out.”
“Shoot.”
“There are forces at work now that have been dormant for millennia, curses laid that no power on earth has seen before, powers determined to make the Winchesters comply with a plan we’re trying to uncover and stop. They may come after you because of your kinship with Mary. If you value your life and the lives of your family, work with us instead of shutting us out. Help us help the Winchesters.”
Gwen looked up at Mark for a moment, the anger on her face fading to something less discernible. Then she looked at Tarvek again. “Gimme your phone number.”
“Reaching for my card case,” he announced and pulled said card case out of his front pants pocket, took a business card out of it, and wrote his cell phone number on the back with a pen Colette handed him. “And if you want to check up on our story,” he added as he passed the card across to Gwen, “the name of Sam’s friend is Zachary Warren.”
Gwen nodded once, accepted Tarvek’s card, and handed him her own. “Don’t call unless it’s an emergency.”
He nodded and accepted her card. “Understood. Thank you.”
With that, Gwen stood, and she and Mark left without another word.
“You know she’s planning to track your phone,” Violetta noted, scraping blackberry jam onto another piece of toast.
“Then it’s a good thing I told her the truth, isn’t it?” Tarvek replied with a wink and took a drink of coffee.
Back in the room, Tarvek took a nap while Violetta emailed her professors and Colette texted with Van. They were checked out and on the road by 8, which got them to Indianapolis in time for lunch and to St. Louis in time to meet Papa Jim at a hotel and brief him on the hunt. Then Colette called Becky and arranged for her to meet them at the Ruth’s Chris location in Clayton for dinner.
Once the general catching-up had finished and the steak order was on its way to the kitchen, Becky shook her head. “I really am glad to see you guys, don’t get me wrong, but... I don’t understand why you’re here. Your whole club just took off from Palo Alto, like, a day after Brady attacked Jess. And then Jess disappeared on Wednesday....”
“She’s safe,” Colette assured her quickly. “She met us in Beetleburg for Thanksgiving with Gil and Agatha; it was something of a last-minute decision. And she and Sam have made up. They’re with Dean and Zeetha right now.”
Becky frowned. “Beetleburg? I’ve heard Sam mention it, but....”
“It’s in Nebraska,” Violetta supplied. “The Winchesters had to go take care of some family business, but we saw the story about Zach’s girlfriend and thought since we were already out this way, we’d stop by and offer to help.”
“But... but how? The lawyer said the police think it’s an open-and-shut case. They’ve got security camera video showing Zach coming home at 10:30, and they won’t believe me that he was with me, at our parents’ house here in Clayton, until at least after midnight.”
“What about your parents?” Papa Jim asked.
Becky shook her head, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Mom and Dad are in Paris half the year. Zach and I were the only people in the house. And so far, we haven’t been able to find a neighbor with security cameras placed in a way that would prove Zach was here. But he couldn’t have done it—nobody can be in two places at one time!”
Tarvek reached over to give Becky’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “We believe you. Look, Colette’s dad has connections to the Sûreté in Paris, and Violetta’s been doing some research on other deaths in the neighborhood. We think we can prove Zach’s been framed by a serial killer who’s a master of disguise.”
Becky sniffled. “Is... is that why somebody stole Zach’s clothes last week?”
“Probably.”
Becky sniffled again and used the Kleenex Colette handed her to wipe her face. “Okay. Thanks. What, um... what information do you need?”
Friday morning, as Jerry Panowski anxiously asked Dean to come to Pennsylvania to meet him in person, Dean shot an equally anxious look across the library table at Sam and suppressed a sigh. Sam and Tarvek were both going to hate him for his answer, but there wasn’t much choice. Dean, Zeetha, and Dad had helped Jerry get a nasty poltergeist out of his house a couple of years earlier while Klaus had been working on something else in Mechanicsburg; Jerry was a nice guy, and Dean couldn’t let him down.
“Listen, Jerry, I gotta be honest,” Dean said. “We’re tied up on somethin’ in Kansas right now, and in this weather, it might take a week for us to get up there.”
“Oh,” said Jerry, plainly disappointed.
“But some friends of ours are in St. Louis, just wrapped up another hunt yesterday. I can call them and see if they’d be willing to fly out to Kittanning to help you with whatever this is.”
“Are they as good as you and your wife and dad?”
Dean chuckled. “Ain’t nobody as good as we are, but yeah, they’re good. I’ve worked with them since before I met Zeetha. Their names are Travis and Colette Murphy.”
Sam looked up from his reading and frowned in confusion.
“Travis and Colette Murphy,” Jerry repeated, evidently writing that down. “How will I know them?”
“Colette’s French, and Trav’s hair is about as red as Zeetha’s is green.”
“R—like, Carrot Top red or fire-engine red?”
“Eh, more magenta/maroon.”
Jerry laughed. “Okay. I’ll make a note of it. Thanks.”
“No prob. Hey, how’d you get this number, anyway? I’ve only had it a few months.”
“Oh, I tried to call your dad, but the voice message said to call you if it was an emergency and gave your number.”
Dean blinked. “Oh. Huh.”
“You didn’t know?”
“No, we, uh, we’re working separate cases right now. I’m not even sure where he is.”
“Huh. Well—you’re sure your friends can handle this?”
“Yeah, yeah, they’ll be able to take care of it if they can get out there. And if they can’t, I’ll make arrangements with somebody else and call you back.”
“Fair enough. Thanks, Dean.” And after they exchanged farewells, Jerry hung up.
“What were Tarvek and Colette hunting in St. Louis?” Sam asked.
“Hang on a sec,” Dean replied and called Colette to pass on Jerry’s request and phone number. She assured him both that there was a flight they could catch at a reasonable time and that she’d be able to convince Tarvek to take the case, which eased Dean’s discomfort only slightly.
“You know Tarvek hates to fly almost as much as you do,” Gil noted from another table as Dean hung up.
Dean sighed. “Yeah, I know. But Caleb’s snowed in, last I heard, so they really are the closest hunters we can trust.”
“But why were they in St. Louis?” Sam pressed.
“Shapeshifter killed Zach Warren’s girlfriend last week and framed him for it.”
“WHAT?!”
“Dude, they handled it. Shifter’s dead, and Zach’s been released. It’s okay. Becky doesn’t even have to miss finals.”
“What—but—did—did they have to tell Becky the truth? I mean, about us?”
“How the hell should I know, Sam? Ask Tarvek when they get back. Not like it would matter if you weren’t so hell-bent on lyin’ to all your friends.”
Sam was Not Amused.
“’Sides, I got more important news. Jerry says he got through to Dad’s voice mail.”
Sam blinked. “Seriously?”
With a shrug of his eyebrows, Dean found Dad’s number in his phone’s contacts and put the phone on speaker while it dialed, then set the phone in the middle of the table while Henry placed his own bookmark and leaned forward to listen at the same time Sam did.
Not only did it ring several times, the automated voice that eventually answered said not that the number was out of service but, “Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system.”
“This is John Winchester,” immediately followed in Dad’s voice. “I can’t be reached. If this is an emergency, call my son Dean.”
Dean exchanged a surprised look with Sam—and almost missed Henry reaching for the phone.
John cringed a little that evening when he checked his phone and saw Dean’s number on the Missed Calls list. He’d just gotten his number restored the day before; he hadn’t expected the boys to discover that it was working again quite this soon. There was a voicemail, too, so he braced himself for a cussing-out from Dean and played it.
“John,” said a voice he hadn’t heard in nearly fifty years, and he almost dropped the phone in his shock. “I’m aware that you can see the phone numbers that have called you, so yes, this is your father, and I am on Dean’s phone. Your sons and Zeetha are with me, and they’re safe. We’re working on a plan to avenge Mary’s death and the attack on Sam’s girlfriend, whom I don’t think you’ve met. Sam tells me you haven’t kept in touch very well since he went to Stanford. In any case, we believe we have a way to stop Azazel and whatever plans he has for Sam. If you’re willing to help, call us back at this number.”
Dazed, John hung up. Where the hell had Pops been all this time? Why had he come out of the woodwork now, and how in the world had he found Sam and Dean? Or was this some sort of monster or demon just pretending to be Pops to lure John into a trap? There was such a thing as a crocotta, after all.
One thing was for damn sure, he decided as he poured himself a stiff drink. There was no way in hell he was calling Dean back before he was absolutely certain that it was safe—or that there was no other choice. Until then, he’d keep his distance and keep working on pinning down Azazel’s next moves.
He could only hope whatever had used Pops’ voice hadn’t lied about the boys being safe.
Next
Tarvek was seething quietly by the time the lights of the Chicago metroplex finally became visible against the darkening horizon Saturday evening. The fact that the weather and the traffic had put them a good two hours behind schedule had only worsened his mood, which hadn’t been great when they’d left Lebanon before dawn that morning to begin with. Hitting the Campbell compound under cover of darkness had been the plan all along, of course, but it was damp and cold and only going to get colder. And aside from the inherent misery of dealing with the elements, which was going to be necessary because Tarvek was supposed to stand guard and Henry had said the Campbells’ underground archive was under a barn, the state of the weather actually justified the Winchesters’ insistence that the Murphys look the part by wearing blue-collar hunter chic.
He, Aaron Travis Sturmvoraus Murphy, who had very nearly minored in fashion design while at Stanford, was wearing blue jeans and plaid flannel, plus steel-toed work boots, thick woolen socks, a sturdy fleece-lined jacket, and a stocking cap. Violetta had already had something that would work, and Colette had been able to borrow from Zeetha and Agatha, but Tarvek had resisted borrowing at all, so Dean and Gil had unceremoniously dragged him down to the Lebanon feed store—the feed store!!—and hadn’t let him leave until he’d purchased the hideous outfit he had on now. At least Dean had conceded that contacts wouldn’t raise any eyebrows, so Tarvek hadn’t had to make matters worse by finding a cheap pair of glasses. Gil had even had the gall to maintain that these clothes were practical... and now the weather was proving him right, blast it all.
“Jealous, dear?” Colette asked in French with a gently teasing smile.
“Jealous?” Tarvek echoed in the same language. “Why?”
“Because we’re here and you’re not back in the bunker working on robots with Agatha.”
“Oh, that. I forgot.” And he had, honestly. Over supper the night before, Agatha had come up with the idea for two classes of robots to deploy in Sinclair’s mansion: scout bots for scanning and cataloging everything from artifacts to lab contents, and explosive bots for clearing rooms in the menagerie. She’d had plans drafted by the time the abduction party returned from the feed store, and she’d been hard at work on prototypes by the time the Murphys had left that morning. Tarvek did have his own idea for a handheld medical scanner that he wanted to work on after they finished this job, but it really wasn’t the same type of gadget Agatha was working on, and he’d said so from the start. Knowing Agatha, the lab she used would be swarming with tiny bots by now, and he probably wouldn’t be able to think with all that commotion driving him to distraction. “Besides,” he continued aloud, “it’s still rather awkward trying to work with Agatha on anything.”
Colette blinked. “With or without Gil there?”
“Yes. Both. It’s not as bad anymore in a social setting, and we are good friends, but... there are some things I can’t forget.”
“You mean things your father told you about her birth mother?”
“Well, that, yes, but also... he wanted me to marry her.”
“What?! After he ensured that her possession by Lucrezia was fully successful?!”
“I know, I know. I think it was mostly to keep up appearances, make everything look legal. How the hell that was supposed to work when she was nine, I have no idea. He said something about not minding sharing with me, though, and something else that sounded like he thought maybe Lucrezia could hand control back to Agatha sometimes so Agatha would be ‘mine’ and Lucrezia would be ‘his’—I don’t even know anymore. He was usually high enough that he didn’t remember that he had only a few years left before his deal came due. The point is, even though I was never really in love with her, I just... it’s awkward, that’s all.”
Before Colette could respond, a quiet “Yahtzee!” from the back seat interrupted the conversation.
“You have spent entirely too much time around Sam,” Tarvek remarked in English.
“Shut up,” Violetta shot back. “I have not. You know John’s always been afraid I’d turn on him.”
Colette shifted to look back at Violetta more directly. “Have you found us a cover story?”
“Boy, have I ever.” Violetta carefully handed Colette her laptop. “I think this is one you guys will actually need to take. It’s in St. Louis.”
Tarvek frowned. “What is it?”
“String of murders with similar MOs, all within a ten-mile radius: woman found in a chair, bound and gagged and beaten to death. Husband or boyfriend—or girlfriend in a couple of cases—is arrested for the murder but claims to have been somewhere else, usually with witnesses, even though security camera footage places the accused at the scene at the time of the murder.”
“A doppelgänger?”
“I’m thinking shapeshifter, but you’ll probably have to get access to the surveillance footage to be sure. Papa Jim told me one time you can tell a shifter from a human by the way the light reflects off the retina into the camera; a shifter’s eyes flare silver, not red like a human’s.”
“So why do you think we specifically need to take this one?”
“The most recent case, just last night,” Colette answered, reading the page that was open on Violetta’s laptop. “This says, ‘The victim’s boyfriend, Zachary Warren, 24, was arrested and charged with the murder. Warren claims to have been at his parents’ house with his sister, Rebecca, who was to have returned to school in California today.’”
Tarvek blinked. “Wait, that’s... Becky and Zach, Sam’s friends? The same Becky Jess stayed with right after the attack?”
“Oui. They came to a few Adventure Club parties with Sam, I think.”
“They did,” Violetta confirmed. “One of them was a time when I’d come to visit you guys. That’s how I recognized Zach’s mugshot in the news story.”
Tarvek nodded. “Right. I remember talking with Zach a few times. Even with a few of Theo’s cocktails in him, he wasn’t a violent sort. I definitely can’t picture him beating his girlfriend to death.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a moment. “We’ve never hunted a shapeshifter before. It might be worth seeing what lore the Campbells have so we don’t go in unprepared.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to call the Winchesters?”
Tarvek shook his head. “No, you know Sam. He’ll want to handle it personally, and Dean won’t be able to convince him to let us take it so they can stay under cover. Sam’s liable to forget that hex bags don’t protect against human eyes, and we have no idea where Zola is or whether Azazel has other humans working for him.” There was also the unresolved sartorial issue, which would come up again if Sam and Dean met them in St. Louis, but Tarvek wasn’t going to say anything about that right now. “I can call Theo to get contact info for Becky, but it’s better if we don’t say anything to the Winchesters until the hunt’s over.”
Colette raised an eyebrow, but all she said was, “All right.”
They stopped in Joliet for gas and supper, during which Violetta gave them an initial briefing on the area where the crimes were occurring, a historic neighborhood called Hyde Park. From there, it was another four hours to the Campbell compound outside of Lansing, which was time enough for Violetta to do further digging into the facts of the case. “It’s looking more and more like a shapeshifter,” she reported as Tarvek finally turned off the highway and tried not to worry about the snowflakes drifting past the headlights. “Each of the houses where a murder occurred had been burglarized shortly beforehand—a week, usually. Only clothing was taken in each burglary. The police think it’s just a coincidence, maybe someone coming out from downtown or crossing the river from East St. Louis looking for a quick score; Hyde Park’s not more than a few miles from either area, so that’s easy enough walking distance if a crook’s determined to go there. But the burglar somehow always manages not to get caught by security cameras, while the killer somehow always does.”
“Sounds like a deliberate frame-up,” Tarvek mused. “Not that it didn’t already, but surely a homeowner knows where his or her security cameras are better than a random schlub from another town and would be just as anxious, if not more so, to avoid them if the alibi being claimed is to hold up. But now I’m wondering why that hasn’t occurred to the police.”
“The prime suspect’s always caught inside the house, and the killer’s never recorded leaving the house. Plus, most of the residents in Hyde Park are African-American.”
“Ahhh,” Tarvek and Colette chorused. As an interracial couple, they understood the implications all too well.
Just then, a row of dusk-to-dawn lights perpendicular to the road became visible, recalling the Murphys’ attention to the task at hand. They reviewed their plan of action one last time, so when the car turned in at the drive and stopped at the gate, they all had their most innocent, disarming smiles ready to turn on the two guards with submachine guns who immediately approached the car while Tarvek rolled down the windows.
“Evening,” Tarvek called to the guard who came around to the driver’s window. “Our name is Murphy; we’re friends of Sam Winchester’s. He suggested we come here for research help.”
“Research?” the guard echoed suspiciously.
“Yes, you see, we’re investigating a possible shapeshifter attack in St. Louis, and Sam thought your family might have more information than his immediate family currently has access to.”
“I’ll need to see some identification.”
“Yes, of course.”
Tarvek reached into his pocket at the same time Colette reached into hers. Together they recited a short Enochian phrase, raised and opened their hands, and blew chamomile into the guards’ faces. By the time the guards hit the ground unconscious, Violetta was already out of the back seat and picking the lock on the gate; Tarvek and Colette got out to drag the guards out of harm’s way, and Violetta opened the gate. Tarvek then jumped back in the car to drive into the compound and park while Colette ran through on foot and helped Violetta close and lock the gate again. Then, sticking to the shadows as much as possible, they converged on one of the ramshackle buildings behind what looked like a large livestock barn. Violetta checked for signs of an alarm system, and finding none, she made short work of opening the latch of one of the windows and then the window itself. All three of them climbed inside as quickly as possible, and Violetta shut and locked the window again.
Colette shone a red LED light around the room, revealing it to be a roughed-in office space with walls of bare board and corrugated metal; there were shelves, a bulletin board, and a worn desk and ’70s-vintage desk chair, but the wooden walls had gaps between the boards, and the metal door had rust spots. Tarvek tried the handle as gently as possible and found that it turned easily, but a slight tug encountered resistance, which meant the door had to be padlocked from the outside. Violetta stamped quietly on the floor until she found a spot that sounded hollow under the desk, so the three of them moved the desk out of the way, and Colette set about finding the latch to lift while Tarvek turned his own attention to getting a length of wire through a gap near the door and into the padlock. He was just starting the fiddly process of picking the lock when he heard the girls climb down the ladder into the archive behind him—he was sure the sound wouldn’t travel far, but metal ladders were almost impossible to descend silently.
Actually picking the lock didn’t take terribly long, although it would have gone faster if Tarvek had had a magnet capable of keeping the lock still despite the door. Getting the lock off the latch and getting the latch open, all without making much noise or leaving scratches anywhere, was harder. (It should have been impossible if the office had been properly constructed, but clearly the Campbells had staked all their security on the two guards at the gate, the mundane appearance of the buildings, and whatever wards there might be about the place. Tarvek strongly disapproved.) He managed to get the door open in the end, however, and slipped out of the office to wait and keep watch. There were windows in the outside wall that let in enough light for him to see tolerably well, so he split his time between watching for motion outside and watching for motion inside.
It wasn’t many minutes more before he heard a slight noise, turned, and found himself at the business end of a shotgun. The light spilling in from outside revealed the person holding the gun to be a round-faced young man with fair hair and beard, a stony expression, and steely blue eyes. His ability to get this close without alerting Tarvek to his presence meant that he must be a very good hunter indeed.
“Ah!” Tarvek exclaimed, reasonably sure the other man couldn’t see past him to know that the padlock was in his pocket and not on the door. “Thank goodness you’ve finally turned up, Mr. Campbell. It is Mr. Campbell, isn’t it?”
“Mark,” said the other man.
“Mark? Nice to meet you. My name’s Murphy, Aaron Murphy. Sam Winchester sent me.” When that garnered no reaction at all, Tarvek tried again. “Mary’s son? Mary Campbell? Samuel’s daughter? I-I think you and Sam must be cousins....”
“Fifth cousin, twice removed.”
“Ah, really? What an interesting family you have.”
Mark Campbell didn’t even twitch.
“The reason I’m here,” Tarvek plowed on, hoping he didn’t sound desperate, “is to get some information about shapeshifters. There’s a case in St. Louis that my partners and I think may be a shapeshifter that’s gone serial, but we’ve never tried to hunt a shapeshifter before, so we don’t even know where to start looking—”
“Sewers.”
“Pardon?”
Campbell just blinked, as if to say, You heard me.
“It... may be living in the sewers? Is that what you mean?”
Campbell nodded once.
Score another one for Winchester/Wulfenbach ingenuity; at least Tarvek wouldn’t have to get anything else grubby if they had to go crawling through a sewer system, and he’d have the perfect excuse to salt and burn this outfit if the smell didn’t come out. “How will we know when we’re close to its lair, though? I mean, the smell won’t exactly....”
“Skin.”
“Skin. It... it sheds its skin when it shifts?!”
Campbell nodded once.
“That’s... rather disgusting. All right. Uh, is there any special ammunition or....”
“Silver.”
“Silver bullets.”
Campbell nodded once and pointed the shotgun at Tarvek’s heart.
Tarvek startled back several steps, hands raised, before he realized. “Oh. Silver bullet to the heart.”
Campbell nodded again, more deeply, as if to say, Now you’re catching on.
“Got it. R-right, well, is... is there any further information we need, or....”
Campbell shook his head.
“Uh, okay, well, I did promise to wait here for my partners—”
“Oh, there you are!” Violetta called from behind Campbell, distracting him just long enough that Tarvek could get the padlock back on the door and grab another handful of chamomile out of his pocket. “Any luck?”
“Yes, actually,” Tarvek replied. “Mr. Campbell here has very graciously given me all the information he thinks we need. So thank you very much, Mark, and....” He recited the spell again and blew chamomile in Campbell’s face, and Campbell went down without a sound.
“Colette’s gone to get the gate,” Violetta reported as she and Tarvek raced out of the building to the car. “Did he really....”
“Yeah, all four words of it,” Tarvek replied. “But that should be enough. You?”
“Got the journal microfilmed and took overview pictures of everything else. That’ll save us some time if we have to come back. They didn’t have much, though, at least not compared to Mr. Singer and the bunker library.”
They jumped in the car and drove through the opened gate, then stopped while Colette shut and locked the gate again and got back in the car. Yet Tarvek didn’t relax until they were safely back on the highway and had been neither followed nor fired upon. Just to be extra safe, once they got well into Lansing itself, they took adjacent rooms in a three-star hotel under the surname of Voltaire, and Colette did all the talking and put the rooms on one of the few credit cards she had left from before their marriage. But nobody crashed in on them at any point during the night, which was a good thing considering the way Colette chose to warm Tarvek up and take the edge off his anxiety and annoyance—an effective way, but one that did leave a person rather vulnerable.
Things were going too smoothly, Tarvek thought glumly when the alarm went off just a few hours later. In fact, he was so convinced that something was about to go disastrously wrong that it was almost a relief to go down to the continental breakfast and hear the weather news people on the TV discussing a massive lake-effect snowstorm that had walloped the south shore of Lake Michigan overnight, shutting down all but emergency traffic on I-94 and I-90. The main reason it wasn’t entirely a relief was that the only way to get from Lansing to Blue Earth in a reasonable amount of time was over that very route, and he said as much as they ate.
“Isn’t there any alternative?” Colette asked.
Tarvek shook his head. “Not one that wouldn’t add at least another half-day to our drive time. We’d probably have to go all the way down to Indianapolis to hit a safe alternate route, and by that point, we’d be halfway to St. Louis already.”
Violetta’s eyes widened, then turned into high-beam puppy eyes.
“You have been spending too much time with Sam!” Tarvek grouched.
“Please, Trav?” she pleaded, mindful of the fact that they weren’t alone in the breakfast room. “As late as we’d be getting in, I’d be too exhausted to go to class tomorrow anyway, and you might not be able to get back to St. Louis before Tuesday night, which could... well, you know.” Could mean the shifter would have time to strike again remained unspoken. “If I go with you, we could rent me a car tomorrow morning, or maybe Papa Jim could meet us and take me home himself.”
“She does have a point,” Colette said quietly, more to her coffee than to him.
Tarvek sighed heavily. “Oh, all right. You email your professors when we get back to the room; I’ll call Papa Jim, and Colette can call Theo.”
Colette swallowed her sip of coffee and shook her head. “Not this early, cheri. You forget the time difference.”
“Shoot, you’re right. What time does his ICU shift start?”
“Mm, not until 8:00, I think. And we are three hours ahead, so....”
Violetta blinked. “Wait, you know who you should call? Van!”
Colette lit up. “But of course! Van knows everybody. I’ll text and also ask him to have Papa Jim call us when Sam can’t overhear.”
“Now ain’t that interesting?” a female voice drawled behind Tarvek, its tone consisting of equal parts suspicion and sarcasm.
Tarvek didn’t turn around; he’d known the two people standing behind his chair had been listening from a nearby table but hadn’t been sure who they were until now. “Won’t you join us, Miss Campbell?”
“Not until you answer some questions, Murphy, or whatever the hell your name is.”
“My name is Murphy, and it’s difficult to have a conversation like this. I presume that’s Mark beside you?”
The stolid silence that greeted that question spoke for itself.
“If Sam Winchester really sent you,” Miss Campbell pressed, “why are you so anxious for him not to know you’re here?”
“He knows we’re here,” Colette corrected. “He doesn’t know that the latest incident involves a friend of his. And he is currently engaged with another case that he can’t drop—to leave now for the sake of his friend could be fatal, but we wouldn’t be able to convince him of that.”
“How do you mean, fatal?”
“Catastrophic,” Violetta answered. “Apocalyptic, even.”
There was a pause, and then the tall, dark-haired, fair-skinned woman he’d seen out the corner of his eye stalked around the table and sat down across from Tarvek, still on her guard. Mark seemingly stayed where he was.
“What did you take last night?” Miss Campbell demanded quietly.
“Nothing,” Tarvek stated, which was technically true.
“So what the hell did you come for?”
“Information.”
“Like hell you did. Even if I buy the case, which I don’t, there are hunters closer to St. Louis than this.”
“Yes, but apparently my cousin here is the only one who’s looked at the deaths closely enough to discern the pattern. And we have it on good authority that only your family had the precise information we needed, not only for our own case, but also for Sam’s.”
“Information about what?”
“The Colt.”
Mark snorted, and Miss Campbell scoffed. “The Colt don’t exist,” she declared, “and even if it did, we don’t have it.”
Tarvek settled back in his seat and crossed his arms. “I never said you did. I said we needed information.”
“Who told you we had any? Sam sure as hell couldn’t know about that; his old man’s a loose cannon, and we ain’t workin’ with him. And for that matter, where’d you get whatever sleep spell you used on Mark?”
“The answer to both questions is the same: the Men of Letters.”
Miss Campbell’s jaw dropped. “Who the hell do you think you’re kidding?” she whispered harshly. “The Men of Letters are dead.”
“Were dead,” Colette corrected again. “One of them came back.”
Miss Campbell looked like she was about to protest again, but Tarvek intervened. “Look, Miss Campbell—”
“Gwen,” Gwen interrupted sharply.
“Let me give you some friendly advice, Gwen. Mark did us a good turn last night, and I’d like to make up for knocking him out.”
“Shoot.”
“There are forces at work now that have been dormant for millennia, curses laid that no power on earth has seen before, powers determined to make the Winchesters comply with a plan we’re trying to uncover and stop. They may come after you because of your kinship with Mary. If you value your life and the lives of your family, work with us instead of shutting us out. Help us help the Winchesters.”
Gwen looked up at Mark for a moment, the anger on her face fading to something less discernible. Then she looked at Tarvek again. “Gimme your phone number.”
“Reaching for my card case,” he announced and pulled said card case out of his front pants pocket, took a business card out of it, and wrote his cell phone number on the back with a pen Colette handed him. “And if you want to check up on our story,” he added as he passed the card across to Gwen, “the name of Sam’s friend is Zachary Warren.”
Gwen nodded once, accepted Tarvek’s card, and handed him her own. “Don’t call unless it’s an emergency.”
He nodded and accepted her card. “Understood. Thank you.”
With that, Gwen stood, and she and Mark left without another word.
“You know she’s planning to track your phone,” Violetta noted, scraping blackberry jam onto another piece of toast.
“Then it’s a good thing I told her the truth, isn’t it?” Tarvek replied with a wink and took a drink of coffee.
Back in the room, Tarvek took a nap while Violetta emailed her professors and Colette texted with Van. They were checked out and on the road by 8, which got them to Indianapolis in time for lunch and to St. Louis in time to meet Papa Jim at a hotel and brief him on the hunt. Then Colette called Becky and arranged for her to meet them at the Ruth’s Chris location in Clayton for dinner.
Once the general catching-up had finished and the steak order was on its way to the kitchen, Becky shook her head. “I really am glad to see you guys, don’t get me wrong, but... I don’t understand why you’re here. Your whole club just took off from Palo Alto, like, a day after Brady attacked Jess. And then Jess disappeared on Wednesday....”
“She’s safe,” Colette assured her quickly. “She met us in Beetleburg for Thanksgiving with Gil and Agatha; it was something of a last-minute decision. And she and Sam have made up. They’re with Dean and Zeetha right now.”
Becky frowned. “Beetleburg? I’ve heard Sam mention it, but....”
“It’s in Nebraska,” Violetta supplied. “The Winchesters had to go take care of some family business, but we saw the story about Zach’s girlfriend and thought since we were already out this way, we’d stop by and offer to help.”
“But... but how? The lawyer said the police think it’s an open-and-shut case. They’ve got security camera video showing Zach coming home at 10:30, and they won’t believe me that he was with me, at our parents’ house here in Clayton, until at least after midnight.”
“What about your parents?” Papa Jim asked.
Becky shook her head, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Mom and Dad are in Paris half the year. Zach and I were the only people in the house. And so far, we haven’t been able to find a neighbor with security cameras placed in a way that would prove Zach was here. But he couldn’t have done it—nobody can be in two places at one time!”
Tarvek reached over to give Becky’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “We believe you. Look, Colette’s dad has connections to the Sûreté in Paris, and Violetta’s been doing some research on other deaths in the neighborhood. We think we can prove Zach’s been framed by a serial killer who’s a master of disguise.”
Becky sniffled. “Is... is that why somebody stole Zach’s clothes last week?”
“Probably.”
Becky sniffled again and used the Kleenex Colette handed her to wipe her face. “Okay. Thanks. What, um... what information do you need?”
Friday morning, as Jerry Panowski anxiously asked Dean to come to Pennsylvania to meet him in person, Dean shot an equally anxious look across the library table at Sam and suppressed a sigh. Sam and Tarvek were both going to hate him for his answer, but there wasn’t much choice. Dean, Zeetha, and Dad had helped Jerry get a nasty poltergeist out of his house a couple of years earlier while Klaus had been working on something else in Mechanicsburg; Jerry was a nice guy, and Dean couldn’t let him down.
“Listen, Jerry, I gotta be honest,” Dean said. “We’re tied up on somethin’ in Kansas right now, and in this weather, it might take a week for us to get up there.”
“Oh,” said Jerry, plainly disappointed.
“But some friends of ours are in St. Louis, just wrapped up another hunt yesterday. I can call them and see if they’d be willing to fly out to Kittanning to help you with whatever this is.”
“Are they as good as you and your wife and dad?”
Dean chuckled. “Ain’t nobody as good as we are, but yeah, they’re good. I’ve worked with them since before I met Zeetha. Their names are Travis and Colette Murphy.”
Sam looked up from his reading and frowned in confusion.
“Travis and Colette Murphy,” Jerry repeated, evidently writing that down. “How will I know them?”
“Colette’s French, and Trav’s hair is about as red as Zeetha’s is green.”
“R—like, Carrot Top red or fire-engine red?”
“Eh, more magenta/maroon.”
Jerry laughed. “Okay. I’ll make a note of it. Thanks.”
“No prob. Hey, how’d you get this number, anyway? I’ve only had it a few months.”
“Oh, I tried to call your dad, but the voice message said to call you if it was an emergency and gave your number.”
Dean blinked. “Oh. Huh.”
“You didn’t know?”
“No, we, uh, we’re working separate cases right now. I’m not even sure where he is.”
“Huh. Well—you’re sure your friends can handle this?”
“Yeah, yeah, they’ll be able to take care of it if they can get out there. And if they can’t, I’ll make arrangements with somebody else and call you back.”
“Fair enough. Thanks, Dean.” And after they exchanged farewells, Jerry hung up.
“What were Tarvek and Colette hunting in St. Louis?” Sam asked.
“Hang on a sec,” Dean replied and called Colette to pass on Jerry’s request and phone number. She assured him both that there was a flight they could catch at a reasonable time and that she’d be able to convince Tarvek to take the case, which eased Dean’s discomfort only slightly.
“You know Tarvek hates to fly almost as much as you do,” Gil noted from another table as Dean hung up.
Dean sighed. “Yeah, I know. But Caleb’s snowed in, last I heard, so they really are the closest hunters we can trust.”
“But why were they in St. Louis?” Sam pressed.
“Shapeshifter killed Zach Warren’s girlfriend last week and framed him for it.”
“WHAT?!”
“Dude, they handled it. Shifter’s dead, and Zach’s been released. It’s okay. Becky doesn’t even have to miss finals.”
“What—but—did—did they have to tell Becky the truth? I mean, about us?”
“How the hell should I know, Sam? Ask Tarvek when they get back. Not like it would matter if you weren’t so hell-bent on lyin’ to all your friends.”
Sam was Not Amused.
“’Sides, I got more important news. Jerry says he got through to Dad’s voice mail.”
Sam blinked. “Seriously?”
With a shrug of his eyebrows, Dean found Dad’s number in his phone’s contacts and put the phone on speaker while it dialed, then set the phone in the middle of the table while Henry placed his own bookmark and leaned forward to listen at the same time Sam did.
Not only did it ring several times, the automated voice that eventually answered said not that the number was out of service but, “Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system.”
“This is John Winchester,” immediately followed in Dad’s voice. “I can’t be reached. If this is an emergency, call my son Dean.”
Dean exchanged a surprised look with Sam—and almost missed Henry reaching for the phone.
John cringed a little that evening when he checked his phone and saw Dean’s number on the Missed Calls list. He’d just gotten his number restored the day before; he hadn’t expected the boys to discover that it was working again quite this soon. There was a voicemail, too, so he braced himself for a cussing-out from Dean and played it.
“John,” said a voice he hadn’t heard in nearly fifty years, and he almost dropped the phone in his shock. “I’m aware that you can see the phone numbers that have called you, so yes, this is your father, and I am on Dean’s phone. Your sons and Zeetha are with me, and they’re safe. We’re working on a plan to avenge Mary’s death and the attack on Sam’s girlfriend, whom I don’t think you’ve met. Sam tells me you haven’t kept in touch very well since he went to Stanford. In any case, we believe we have a way to stop Azazel and whatever plans he has for Sam. If you’re willing to help, call us back at this number.”
Dazed, John hung up. Where the hell had Pops been all this time? Why had he come out of the woodwork now, and how in the world had he found Sam and Dean? Or was this some sort of monster or demon just pretending to be Pops to lure John into a trap? There was such a thing as a crocotta, after all.
One thing was for damn sure, he decided as he poured himself a stiff drink. There was no way in hell he was calling Dean back before he was absolutely certain that it was safe—or that there was no other choice. Until then, he’d keep his distance and keep working on pinning down Azazel’s next moves.
He could only hope whatever had used Pops’ voice hadn’t lied about the boys being safe.
