Supernatural Heart of the Dragon

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  The most valuable piece of information gleaned from their research, however, had been an SFPL call slip that was stuck between two pages. Bartow had pocketed it immediately, because the slip had revealed the name and address of the last person who had taken the book out.

  Albert Chao.

  Once they had transcribed the counterspell, and gathered the materials they’d need to cast it, they headed to Chao’s apartment, hoping to stop him before he instructed the Heart of the Dragon to kill anyone else. Just now that next victim looked likely to be Samuel himself, as he barely dodged a powerful slice from the spirit’s katana.

  Samuel put a hand to his cheek, which was hot from the proximity of the flames. Strangely enough, though he could feel the heat, the fire hadn’t set the apartment alight.

  “How’s that spell coming, Little Miss?” Samuel called to Mary.

  “Don’t call me that!” she shouted from the hallway.

  Then she came into view in the doorway. In her right hand she held a piece of notepaper with the phonetic spelling of the words to the spell. In her left she had a pinch of pulverized kihada root, which they had purchased from a small drugstore in San Francisco’s tiny Japantown.

  The Heart of the Dragon swung his sword once again.

  Samuel tripped over a battered chair, which was all that saved him as the fiery blade of the katana singed his bald scalp. The apartment was very sparsely furnished, but it was also very small, and very soon Samuel was going to run out of places to dodge.

  “Where’s the damn Claymore?” he asked Deanna, who was keeping herself between the spirit and Mary.

  “Are you out of your mind? That’s a katana! It’d slice the Claymore in two!”

  The spirit reared above him wielding its flaming weapon, without realizing it, Samuel suddenly found himself literally backed into a corner.

  He heard a voice. Mary was speaking the incantation slowly, making sure to get the pronunciation right. He knew she had to do it right in order for it to work, but if she didn’t hurry up, he was going to be skewered and burned to a crisp.

  Samuel thought quickly: there was a window nearby, but a quick glance revealed that it wasn’t the one with the fire escape. Albert lived on a fifth-story walk-up, so jumping out wasn’t an option.

  In the moments before the creature struck, he really wished that shooting Albert had broken the man’s hold on the spirit.

  Dammit.

  The warrior raised his katana. Heat from the demonic flames licked across Samuel’s face. He’d been half tempted to fire his revolver, just to see what would happen, but knew that he’d only be wasting a bullet.

  Now, though, he’d take whatever he could, because there was nowhere to dodge, nowhere to run....

  He raised the pistol.

  Mary finished the incantation and threw the pulverized root into the flames that surrounded the ronin.

  Though the katana remained raised, the spirit threw its head back and screamed. The flames grew hotter, and Samuel had to put his hands in front of his face to try to ward off the pounding heat.

  A flash of light.

  Then nothing.

  Mary was grinning.

  “Guess it worked,” she said triumphantly.

  “For the time being,” Deanna said. “Remember what the professor’s notes said: all this spell does is banish it for twenty years.”

  Mary shrugged.

  “So we come back in twenty years and stop it again. We can come down in a shuttle from our house on the moon.”

  Samuel rolled his eyes.

  “Moon shuttle. Right. If we’re on the moon, we’ll be too busy fighting the monsters up there, I’ll bet.”

  Even as he spoke, the sound of sirens pierced the quiet of the evening. Glancing out of the window, he saw both fire trucks and police vehicles approaching the building.

  “We need to scram,” he said urgently. Chao was harmless now—or, rather, for the next twenty years—and he needed medical attention. But the police could handle that. The Campbells needed to beat feet out of there.

  As they dashed down the back stairs toward the back-alley exit that would, with luck, keep them away from the police, Deanna spoke in a terse whisper.

  “When we get back to the hotel, I’ll call Marty and arrange for a flight home.”

  Feeling magnanimous after the successful hunt, Samuel added his own two cents.

  “And then you can call Jack, Little Miss. Maybe the two of you can have dinner together.”

  Deanna shot him a look that expressed surprise, but Mary shook her head.

  “That’s okay, Dad. I mean, we could all have dinner with him, as a thank you, I guess.”

  They ran out of the back door, heading toward the street that ran behind the building.

  “I thought you liked the boy.”

  “He’s nice,” Mary said, “and it was good to see him. But, like you always say, Dad, romance and hunting don’t mix.” She grinned. “Except for you two.”

  Deanna chuckled as they headed toward a bus stop.

  “Let’s go home.”

  Albert inhaled sharply, then sat up quickly.

  His knee felt fine.

  Putting a hand to his head, he found that the gash had closed over, and he wiped the blood away.

  Unlike the simple punch from the previous night, this was a pair of wounds, and it took a bit longer for them to heal back up. First the knee injury, which sent paroxysms of pain throughout his entire body. When he hit the wall, he did pass out for a few seconds—but he heard bits of conversation among those three gaijin, including the girl speaking—with an awful accent—the words to the other spell he’d found in the library.

  But by the time they’d finished casting the spell and left, he was whole again. Whatever link he had with the Heart of the Dragon, it still existed.

  He could not be hurt—at least not permanently.

  He yanked up his bloodstained pant leg, exposing the bare flesh. There was blood on his knee, but the skin itself was unbroken and unscarred.

  He grinned. It was like magic.

  In fact it was magic—very good magic.

  While Albert had no idea who those three gaijin had been, he knew that they thought the battle was over—at least for the next two decades.

  But by the time twenty years rolled around again, Albert intended to be ready.

  Three police officers appeared at his broken door.

  “Don’t move!”

  “What’s going on, officers?” he asked innocently.

  “We got a report of gunshots being fired,” one of them said.

  “No, sir, officer,” Albert responded in as deferential a voice as he could manage. The last thing he wanted right now was trouble with the police.

  Another officer inspected the shattered lock.

  “Your door looks like it’s been kicked in.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been trying to get the landlord to fix that for weeks,” he replied.

  The officer snorted. “I’ll bet.” Then he looked down. “What happened to your leg?”

  “Got the pants from Goodwill. Can’t afford to be picky these days, you know?”

  The police had a few more questions, but other than the door, there was no evidence of a crime, and they didn’t seem eager to pursue it.

  As soon as they left, Albert smiled.

  That taken care of, he now had two decades to figure out the best way to put the power of his ancestor to his use.

  TEN

  “Y’know,” Sam Winchester said, “it still freaks me out a little.”

  Dean was still staring at the printout of the forty year-old San Francisco Chronicle article.

  “What, that Mom and our grandparents were hunters?” Dean remembered how stunned he’d been when a nineteen year-old girl had started beating the crap out of him—and then he’d seen the protective charm bracelet she was wearing and put two and two together.

  Mom really knew how to kick ass.

  Family history had nev
er been a huge priority for the Winchesters while they were growing up, though. Dean’s grandparents were barely remembered faces on faded pictures that had hung on the staircase wall. The only family that had mattered after Mom died were Sam and Dad, and later folks like Bobby—who had become a surrogate uncle to the boys, and more as they grew older. And Caleb and Pastor Jim.

  Sam smiled when he answered Dean’s question.

  “No, somehow it makes sense that they would be hunters,” he said. “But it’s weird that we were named after them, and Dad never told us.”

  Dean snorted derisively.

  “Add it to the list of things Dad never told us. We could fill a damn—” Suddenly, he got a faraway look in his eyes. “—book. Sonofabitch.”

  Bolting from the kitchen into the living room, Dean made a beeline for the worn duffel bag he always traveled with and pulled out the leather-bound notebook that had been an integral part of their lives as hunters these past four years— ever since Dad had disappeared, and Dean had gone to Stanford to drag Sam back to the life that he’d left behind.

  Dad’s journal.

  Furiously, he started flipping pages until he found the section that covered the late 1980s and found what he was looking for.

  “Here we go,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Heart of the Dragon—San Francisco, 1989. Twenty years later—and Dad faced it!”

  Sam got up from the kitchen table and followed his brother.

  “Okay, yeah, that’s starting to ring a bell. There was a sword involved, wasn’t there?”

  “Yup,” came a voice from the back room. Bobby wheeled himself into the living room, a long, thin package wrapped in brown parcel paper and twine sitting on his lap as he navigated his wheelchair until he was sitting next to the brothers.

  Staring up at them from under the bill of his omnipresent baseball cap, he held up the parcel.

  “If you two’re goin’ after Doragon Kokoro, you’re gonna be needin’ this.”

  Sam took the package.

  Expecting a katana, Dean was surprised when Sam undid the twine, ripped off the plain brown paper, and unwrapped a hook sword. It had a hilt with a wrist guard and an additional piece beyond that, with the long blade that curved around at the very end to form the hook.

  That wasn’t the interesting part, though: that was the runes in Asian characters—Dean could never tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese—etched into the sword’s blade.

  “When your father faced off against Doragon Kokoro twenty years ago,” Bobby began, “this is what he used to send the spirit away. We were hopin’ it was permanent, but we knew we’d probably just accomplished what your grandparents apparently did, and got rid of it for two decades.

  “S’why I kept the damn thing.”

  Dean snorted again. Bobby didn’t need a reason to keep anything—he was the classic pack rat. And as they’d discovered time and again, in this line of work, it didn’t pay to get rid of anything that might be useful in the future.

  Sam looked at Dean.

  “It’s been years since I read that part of Dad’s journal. What’s it say?”

  Dean looked back down at the leather-bound notebook.

  “A whole bunch, actually.”

  ELEVEN

  John Winchester pulled into the yard, the smell of incense still stinging his nostrils. It had been a difficult fight, but the spell he’d cast had gotten rid of the poltergeist once and for all.

  Part of him had been tempted to stay behind in Henderson and get a good night’s sleep, but he’d been away from the boys for far too long. He had enrolled them in a school in South Dakota, giving the Singer Salvage Yard as their address, and the fall semester was almost over. Once it ended, he’d stop abusing Bobby Singer’s hospitality.

  John wasn’t comfortable making use of it this much, but he also understood the need to give the boys as much continuity in their schooling as possible—especially six year-old Sammy.

  He’d see where the work took them from here on in.

  There was another reason he felt the need to see them. That poltergeist had targeted two young girls, and the danger they’d been in hit too close to home. John knew his boys would need to be able to defend themselves against whatever was out there—he’d already started that process with Dean, Sammy’s ten year-old brother. Dean was a crack shot with John’s M1911, and could load the shotgun with iron rounds and fire them off in one smooth motion.

  Eventually he’d need to train Sammy, too.

  But not yet.

  He’d been driving all night, and the Impala’s engine was starting to make an odd clunking noise. He’d need to borrow Bobby’s tools and check it out, once he got a good night’s— or day’s—sleep.

  The sun was rising in the east when he pulled in, shining haphazardly through the assorted cars, trucks, and wrecks that surrounded Bobby’s house. Squinting as he clambered out of the Impala, he walked stiffly toward the porch.

  Sam ran out before he could even reach the front door.

  “Dad!” the boy cried as he wrapped his arms around John’s legs.

  Unable to help himself, John grinned.

  “Hey there, Sammy.”

  “I’m so glad you’re home!” the boy said, peering up at his father with an angry expression. “Dean’s being a creep.”

  Looking up, John saw Bobby and Dean standing in the doorway. The former had on his usual: flannel shirt, ball cap, and jeans, and a look of irritation. The latter was sulking.

  “I’m not a creep,” Dean protested. “I just ate the last donut. It’s no big deal!”

  “But Bobby said I could have it!” Sam wailed from his position still wrapped around John’s legs.

  “I said you could both have two each,” Bobby said in a long-suffering tone. He’d told John several times that he didn’t mind watching Dean and Sam, because he’d never had kids of his own. Right now, though, it looked as if he was coming to understand that there were benefits to being childless.

  John started to walk toward the house, but as Sam still clung to one of his legs, it was more of an awkward shuffle. Before he got five feet they were both giggling at the ridiculousness of it. After a second, Bobby and Dean started laughing, too, and minutes later they were all sitting around Bobby’s kitchen table, back in a good mood.

  Dean and Sam told him all about their adventures while he was gone. On the weekends they played games of hide-and-seek amidst the cars in the yard—a paradise for two young boys. During the week they went to school, though only Sam seemed interested in talking about that. Then again, he was in the first grade, so the course load was easier than Dean’s.

  “Miss Roach said I could do third-grade work!” he said proudly.

  John was surprised.

  “That’s ‘cause you’re a dexter,” Dean said.

  “No, it means he’s smart, Dean,” John said. “And that’s good. I’m proud of you, Sammy.”

  Sam stuck out his tongue at his brother.

  “Dean’s doing third-grade work, too!”

  “Screw you, Sammy!” Dean said, who was now in the fifth grade.

  John put on the voice that his drill sergeant had always used in the Corps.

  “Hey! Enough of that!” he said sternly. “I hear any more, and you won’t like what happens.”

  Both boys clammed right up, looking down at their laps abashedly.

  “Sorry, sir,” Dean said.

  “Sorry, Dad,” Sammy echoed.

  “That’s better.”

  After a while, the boys went off to play, and John followed Bobby into the living room. They sat on the couch, each holding a bottle of Budweiser, and John filled him in on the poltergeist.

  “Sounds like you handled it okay,” Bobby drawled.

  John chuckled at Bobby’s talent for understatement.

  “Yeah. The Impala’s engine’s acting up again, by the way. I need to sleep off the drive, but I wanna put it up on the blocks later on.”

  “No problem.” Bob
by had been part of the community of hunters for a few years longer than John, and he’d already gained a reputation as the go-to guy for car repair. But John was a fine mechanic in his own right, and he knew the Impala’s engine better than anyone.

  John rubbed his eyes, an action that cleared his vision but only served to increase his fatigue. The post-hunt adrenaline had kept him going on the road, but now that he was back with the boys, exhaustion was starting to cover him like a flannel blanket.

  “Anything cooking?” he asked.

  Bobby had his finger on the pulse of the hunting community better than anyone outside of Harvelle’s Roadhouse. What John really wanted to know was if he’d received any information that would lead them to Mary’s killer.

  “Actually, yeah.” Bobby got to his feet and started rummaging through some of the many papers that were strewn about the desk in front of the fireplace. “Doragon Kokoro’s back.”

  The name didn’t ring any bells.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nasty-ass spirit. Twenty years ago, it showed up in San Francisco killin’ folks. Now it’s back, and I got the only thing that’ll stop it.”

  Suddenly alert, John immediately started calculating the mileage in his head.

  “San Francisco’s a long way off—especially with the Impala’s engine acting up. But I can probably get out there—”

  Bobby held up a hand.

  “Whoa, there, John. You just said yourself that you’re wiped out. And you ain’t spent time with the kids in a dog’s age.”

  John agreed with him, but at the mere mention of another hunt, another killer to destroy, another chance at maybe—maybe—finding out who killed Mary, his exhaustion fell away like autumn leaves.

  “You got someone else who can do it?”

  Bobby hesitated, and that was all John needed.

  “You said people are dyin’, Bobby. That’s all that matters.” And revenge, but he didn’t need to mention that. “What do I need to do?”

  Reaching behind his desk, Bobby pulled up a sword from the floor. John was confused as to why it wasn’t in a scabbard, then he saw that it was a hook sword, of the sort that came from Asia. Those things didn’t really holster well....