by David Reed
Two bones from a chicken’s foot.
An unbroken spider’s egg.
Lavender and hemp (Cannabis sativa—and no funny business, people) in equal amounts. Don’t matter how much, just as long as they’re equal.
Something to do with goofer dust. Right? No. Goofer dust keeps hellhounds at bay, and is also used in . . . I can’t remember. Damn. Guess you’ll have to find somebody with a working thinker to tell you the rest of the recipe.
Hex bags can also be used for more offensive purposes, but I won’t get into that. That kinda magic is dark and will eat away your soul if you dive too deep into it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about magic in general, it’s that there’s a cost to it—a consequence to every magical action you take. You want to stay on the good side of that line, or you’ll end up just like the things you’re trying to hunt. Speaking of, that brings us to the final demon vulnerability:
• Sam Winchester. The most powerful weapon I’ve ever seen used against a demon? The mind of Sam Winchester. Let this be a cautionary tale. Sam has abilities like you wouldn’t believe, but they’re like a car engine—they require a lot of fuel. The fuel that drove his engine? Demon blood. Drinking it gave him sway over demons, let him fling them around in the same way they usually fling us around, but he could do way more than that—he could drain the life out of them just by lookin’ at ’em. But like I said, there was a price. You can’t drink that kind of demon blood without becoming a little bit demon yourself. Sam’s clean now, but he went through hell to get that way—twice. Trust me, you do not want to go through demon detox. And don’t think you can just go drink a little demon blood yourself and get those same powers, don’t work that way. At least I don’t think it does. Never been dumb enough to try myself.
All this applies to your everyday demon, but that’s not all there is. There’re types that are way, way worse. Taxonomically speaking, the easiest way to tell the difference is by eye color. Black eyes are the garden-variety. Then there’s:
• Red eyes. Most folk call these crossroads demons, ’cause of their MO. They’re summoned by humans at a crossroads to act, basically, as genies. You make a wish, they grant it, but the price is steep. Most demon deals are for ten years, and at the end of that period they come back to collect what they’re owed: your soul. Now, I can’t say that only idiots would ever make a deal like that, because I’m guilty of it myself. There were extenuating circumstances, ya see. And I got the pink slip back for my soul, so no harm no foul, but it’s a slippery damn slope. In this line of work, you get into situations with no clear exit, and you’ll be tempted—especially since crossroads demons have power beyond what you’d think is possible. All the stuff that Aladdin’s genie couldn’t do, like bringing people back from the dead, making them fall in love with you, the whole deal, they can do it.
A smug Irish bastard named Crowley is the king of the crossroads demons, and he’ll lord that over you every time you meet him.
• Orange eyes. Haven’t encountered one myself, but I’ve heard stories about an orange-eyed demon who raised hell back in the seventies. Her thing was to take over the bodies of newly married women and use ’em to murder their husbands. Couple of the guys lived, said their blushing brides flashed orange eyes then went Psycho on them. Similar enough to Karen’s case, but I know for a fact that demon had black eyes. Even in my current predicament, with the memories dripping right outta my skull, I could never forget that sight.
• Blue eyes. A demon named Samhain had blue eyes, was the only one of that type I’ve ever heard of. The raising of Samhain broke one of the sixty-six seals—the seals that were keeping Lucifer chained up in his coop, so it should be plenty obvious that Samhain wasn’t a great guy to be around. If you’re an omen of Satan’s imminent arrival, you’re bad news, period. Sam and Dean took Samhain down, but not before witnessing his abilities—summoning revenants (zombies, more or less) and unleashing a blast of white energy. Luckily, Sam was hopped up on demon blood at the time, so he was able to resist the effects of that energy. It was awfully similar to the abilities of . . .
• White eyes. Lilith and Alastair being the prime examples. Alastair was hell’s chief interrogator, and by that I mean torturer. When Dean Winchester was in the Pit, it was Alastair who put him on the rack every day. Lilith was, well, the demon bride of Satan, if that puts an image into your mind. She was the one pulling the strings on Lucifer’s jailbreak. Also, she ate babies. Not kidding. Both of those yahoos are dead now, so at least there’s that. They were far more powerful than any black-eyed demon I’ve ever seen, and had some special skills, like that white energy blast that Samhain could pull. Both Lilith and Alastair were impervious to devil’s traps, Ruby’s knife, salt, iron, the works. They both were resistant to Sam’s psychic power, at least until he really went overboard and drank a couple gallons of demon blood. Then he popped ’em like lightbulbs on concrete. If you encounter a white-eyed demon, your best bet is to call a Winchester or run like hell. Do not engage one by yourself. Do not try to exorcise them, that’ll just piss ’em off. Lilith was the very first demon ever created (by Lucifer himself), and as such was incredibly powerful. Lore says there are at least two more white-eyed demons out there, though they may well be shuttered up in hell at the moment. I hope for humanity that they are.
• Yellow eyes. Saved the worst for last. A yellow-eyed demon named Azazel set in motion a lot of things for me, Sam, and Dean; for the whole world, really. He was part of the plot to raise Lucifer from his cage—his job was to make sure that Sam was in place to break the final seal (killing Lilith). He made demon deals with desperate women—gave them whatever they needed in exchange for the right, ten years later, to come to their homes and feed his own blood to their infant children. Sam Winchester was one of those kids. Azazel did more than just feed Sam demon blood, though—he killed Mary Winchester and started John on his path towards becoming a hunter. The other children Azazel visited also developed special abilities, and eventually were pitted against each other in a fight to the death. Long story short, Dean avenged his mom’s death, put a Colt bullet right in Azazel’s grapefruit. Luckily for us, Azazel’s the only yellow-eyed demon ever referenced in the lore books.
One last wrinkle in the demon lore—the Croatoan virus. You’ve heard of Roanoke, right, one of the first European colonies in the Americas? Everybody in the village goes missing mysteriously, leaving just the word “Croatoan” carved on a tree? A demonic virus was responsible for their disappearance—or “demonic germ warfare,” as Sam likes to call it. Basically, it’s the monster plague. Turns people into demonic zombies, hungry for violence. It spreads through blood-to-blood contact, which, when they’re as bite-happy as Croatoan demons are, is pretty much inevitable. The good news is that they’re way easier to kill than a regular demon, though that’s not much consolation for the person that was infected. A shot to the head should take care of it, but I’d double-tap, just in case. Part of Lucifer’s plan to rid the earth of humanity was to unleash the Croatoan virus through a swine-flu vaccine—luckily, we caught wind of the plan and were able to stop it before the real damage was done, but man, it coulda been bad. End of days bad. Because here’s the rub—there may be millions of demons out there, somewhere . . . but most of them are locked up tight in hell, and those walls are pretty secure. Only a small percentage get to walk the earth. But with Croatoan, the potential’s there for a demon army, numbering in the hundreds of millions. Instead of letting a soul bake in hell for a few hundred years before it turns into a demon, you just gotta expose them to the virus, and blammo. Demon. And there’s no cure for it, no way back. The scariest part . . . I got no clue what happens to the human soul inside when it’s exposed to Croatoan. There’s a chance, and it’s just my own theory, that Croatoan is the equivalent of poison for the soul. Rots you out from the inside. You could be the most pious, God-fearing guy on the block, and one drop of infected blood condemns you to an eternity in hell. Tell me that ain’t scarier than
. . . just about anything.
I need another drink.
I’m sure I’m forgetting something . . . hopefully not the part that’ll save your ass if you run into one of these yourself. Should get back to the problem at hand. Memory. Demons have the motive, for sure—they’d jump at any chance to mess with a hunter—but do they have the means? Alastair, Lilith, Azazel, Crowley, they’ve all shown that they have the power to do things far greater than a regular demon, but could they really put a tap into my brain and suck out the juice? I’ve been going through my sources as I put this together, and nothing points to them having that kinda power.
But that don’t answer the big question—why the hell is “Karen” scratched into the Chevelle’s windshield? What connection could there be? Could it be that demon, the one that Rufus ripped out of Karen, come back for round two? There’s just no way to know, not without more evidence.
You get now that demons are threat-number-one to humanity, but, I’ve got a nagging tickle in the back of my head, tellin’ me I might be looking in the wrong direction on this one. That I shouldn’t be looking down . . . I should be looking up.
Angels
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 2008, I woulda told you that angels were a myth. Demons were real, monsters were real, ghosts were real, hell was real, but the only thing standing up for the side of good was mankind. Kind of a depressing worldview, but that’s what the evidence showed. Though in a way, it was almost comforting—there was nothing out there gonna save us but us, and that made us important. It gave us purpose, activated our survival instincts—it’s the reason there are hunters. If there were angels up there making sure things were fair and balanced, we could all sit poolside drinking booze with little umbrellas in it and enjoying the scenery.
There are angels, but I’m not in Cabo working on my tan, so how do you square those two facts?
Angels are dicks.
Yeah, even He-Man there.
In the grand scheme of things, everybody looks out for themselves, and you’ll never learn anything truer than that. Everybody’s actions are steeped in their own interests, even angels’. They may have been created to serve God and man, but since God flew the coop . . . they’ve been following the letter of divine law, not the intent. They were created before us, but weren’t given free will. Bummer for them. Ever since, a certain heavenly contingent has been on the warpath, determined to wipe us off the planet so that they can come in and enjoy the paradise that God created for us. A couple of us talkin’ apes stood up for ourselves (with the help of an angel named Castiel who turned against his brothers) and we’ve (at least for now) stopped the great planetary enema of 2010 from moving forward. So, humans are still pretty much the only force in the universe standing up for humans, but that’s probably how it should be.
Why do I bring the winged bastards up? Because they’re the most powerful things out there, and the only ones that I know for a fact can mess with a man’s memory. An angel named Zachariah made Sam and Dean think that they were peons in a big architecture firm for a week. Castiel wiped away all of Lisa and Ben Braeden’s memories of Dean—that was at Dean’s request, once he realized that knowing him was just gonna get them hurt, or worse. So I know they have the hardware to blot out memories, though I can’t for the life of me figure out why they’d be targeting me. The Apocalypse was called off. That war’s over.
Unless—maybe I learned something that I wasn’t supposed to. Maybe, between Ashland and here, I saw something, read something, figured something out that turned the tables on the whole thing, and now they’re cleaning up the mess? No—because if angels are one thing, it’s orderly. My mind right now, it’s the opposite. When they messed with Sam and Dean’s memory, they did a bang-up job, made them really believe that they weren’t brothers, that they’d had entirely different lives than the ones they actually have. If an angel was behind this . . . I have to think they’d have done a better job, left my brain in better condition. Left fewer holes.
But it’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? That I saw what I wasn’t supposed to, and somebody’s making sure that I don’t remember it?
For the record, I’ve tried to contact the one angel I’m on speaking terms with, Castiel, and heard nothing back. He’s busy fighting a war in heaven, so . . . Guess my problem is small fries compared to that.
It’s been close to forty hours since I slept. I should shut my eyes for a bit, see if that doesn’t clear some of this up. I’ll come back to this once I can see straight.
. . . . .
Nope. Sleep’s not happening. It’s about three in the morning now, and I’m wired. I went back out to the junkyard, looked through the car again for clues. Found a few receipts in the glove compartment (a guy’s gotta write off his business expenses), all of them from Ashland, all from before I went back to the swamp. Either I didn’t stop for food on the way back to South Dakota, or I was messed up enough to not care about lowering my tax liability—and I’d have to be pretty messed up for that. Also, some of the receipts were for three meals, which means . . . Sam and Dean were there, maybe the whole time. Why is it I can picture parts of it so clearly but can’t remember who was with me? I mean, I was there to . . . wait. Why did I go to Ashland?
I just re-read what I wrote about the banshee, almost none of it rings a bell, now. More stuff’s leaking out. Balls.
I have to blast through this, quick and dirty. Get what I know out there before I don’t know it anymore.
Angels.
They’re not the “fluffy wings and harps” types you see on Christmas cards. Angels are divine warriors, soldiers of God—His own heavenly army. Think the Mossad, but with a worse sense of humor. Or God’s Secret Service, including the suits. Their power can’t be overstated. They do have wings, but they’re not visible to humans—while on earth, they use human vessels to move around, like demons. Most of the time, they look like trench coat–wearing mooks.
Their abilities:
• Unimaginable physical strength. They can take a licking and keep on ticking. Only the highest level demon stands a chance in a physical fight with an angel. No human dare even try. Bullets, devil’s traps, iron, salt . . . none of it will even ruffle their trench coats. I tried every mystical warding symbol I knew, none of them stopped Cass from walking in the door when Dean and I first met him.
• Smiting. Angels can kill with a touch of their fingers—and some of them don’t even need the touching part. Works on humans, demons, monsters, whatever. If it’s alive in any sense of the word, you bet your ass an angel can kill it. Zachariah gave Sam stomach cancer with a snap of his fingers. Took away his lungs with another snap. You don’t fight angels. You find a way to have leverage over them, or you get killed by them. Even their appearance is deadly. When Pamela Barnes used a séance to spy on Castiel’s true form, it burned the eyes right out of her head. When Cass spoke to Dean with his true voice, he shattered glass and nearly popped Dean’s eardrums.
• Teleportation. As I said, they’re not fluttering around on little angel wings. When angels want to go someplace, they just go, appearing instantly out of the ether. That can be both helpful and damn annoying, since they can appear when they’re called immediately, but they also can leave without so much as a tip of the hat. And just try fighting something that can appear behind you right as you’re swinging your blade.
• Telekinesis. Same as with the high-level demons, angels can manipulate the stuff around them with their minds. Fling people into walls, send out blasts of psychic energy, pick up cars and break ’em in half . . . it’d be impressive if they were on our side. Since most of them aren’t, it’s just scary.
• Time travel. One of the many ways angels dick around with human civilization: messing with our history. Angels have the power to go back in time and change things, though they claim that history is already written and that we all have a destiny and blah blah blah whatever. Same angel that told Dean Winchester he couldn’t go back to save his mother from being killed sent ano
ther angel back in time to un-sink the Titanic. Time is flexible. Certain things will always be the same (the sky will always be blue, steak will always be delicious) but some things are up for grabs. Little things, like who’s alive and who never existed. Who lives happily ever after and who ends up alone with a bottle of whiskey at a piece of crap Wang PC, typing out the sum total of his life’s experiences in the hope that somebody will read it and . . . never mind. Angels can time travel. That’s all you really need to know.
• Omniscience. Don’t know how they do it, but angels have a way of keeping tabs on a lot of things at once. Like, say, every activity in an entire town, down to the smallest detail. There are limits, of course, and they can’t be everywhere at once, but it’s downright creepy how aware they are sometimes. Don’t think you can cross an angel and get away with it.
• Dream visitation. Say you’ve found a way to hide yourself from an angel (I’ll get to that in a bit)—but the angel still wants to have words with you. Likely they’ll just pop into your dreams and scare the pants off you just as you’re getting cozy with Tori Spelling.
• Healing powers. I have to say, this one I like. Angels have the power to raise the dead and heal any injury, though it requires a lot of celestial energy. That’s how Castiel brought Dean back from hell . . . and how Cass brought me back from the dead after Lucifer snapped my neck. Don’t expect them to be that benevolent for you. Most angels would sooner blast your corpse out of existence rather than help you out.