His arms hung limply at his sides, and he concentrated on moving his hands. Just an inch.
His right hand came forward. Dean slid it upward into his pocket. Jason’s back was still to him. His fingers closed around the welcome cold of the .45. With great effort, he pulled it out.
Jason flipped Don over onto his back, and Dean could hear the man hyperventilating in fear. Dean slid the .45 onto his lap, unable to lift it higher than a couple of inches. He used his leg to steady himself, sliding the gun toward his kneecap to get some elevation on the barrel.
Jason tore open Don’s parka, exposing the bare skin. Dark bruises covered Don’s flesh, the avalanche already having taken a toll. The aswang bent over him, exposing his side to Dean, and Dean took his chance. He fired three rounds. The shots rang out deafeningly in the tiny space and Dean thrilled to the scent of cordite.
Jason staggered backward, gripping his side, and let out a piercing scream. He whirled toward Dean, eyes narrowing. Dean could hear Jason’s flesh bubbling already, the bullets working their way through his organs.
Jason advanced on him, and Dean fired again, hitting him in the face, the chest, then again in the stomach. He unloaded the whole clip, knowing that if Jason survived, he’d take the gun, and probably a whole hell of a lot more—like Dean’s heart and brain.
Smoke billowed out from the bullet holes, the smell of sizzling meat stealing over the room. Jason reached him, clawed hand coming down hard on Dean’s gun. It flew out of his grip, landing in the far corner near the hallway entrance. The crack and pop of roasting meat filled Dean’s ears as Jason bent down over him. Dean tried to kick him, but all he could do was weakly punch Jason in the chest and face. He grabbed the feeding tube, trying to tear it off, but his hand wouldn’t close tightly enough around the glistening flesh. He could see bits of cooking fat jumping out of the bullet holes.
Jason grabbed him by the throat and squeezed. Dean felt his veins throb. His head swam, red filling his vision. He tried to breathe, but couldn’t. Then the proboscis attached itself to Dean’s chest. The needle teeth bit down and he felt cold venom entering his body. The aswang held him there, hand tightly around Dean’s throat. The lethargic feeling of paralysis returned, stealing over him. He ached for a breath, but the clenched hand around his trachea made it impossible.
Dean’s world went black.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Sam put up Bobby’s tent and got him inside his sleeping bag. Snow continued to fall, blanketing the tent fly as soon as they got it set up. He’d finally convinced Bobby to put his warm clothes back on. Bobby grew quiet, sitting very still.
Sam took the opportunity to gather kindling and logs in the dwindling light. He found a few dry sticks and pine needles and was incredibly grateful to find a box of waterproof matches still in his pack. He moved nearer the tent, gently laying out all the pine needles around the smaller twigs. His whole body shook with the cold. His fingers barely worked. As he struck the match and willed the pine needles to catch, his mind flashed back to ‘To Build a Fire,’ which he’d read in fourth grade. They were not going to suffer the terrible fate of Jack London’s character.
His trembling hands got a match lit and when the pine needles caught, it was the most glorious flash of light Sam had ever seen. It swept through the collection of kindling, and slowly he added more and more sticks and eventually a few logs. They hissed and sizzled, wet from the snow, but they still burned.
He got Bobby out of the tent and sat him in front of the fire. Filling his water bottle with snow, Sam set it close enough to the heat to melt the contents. Then he offered it to Bobby, who welcomed the drink. Sam took a few swigs, too. Slowly the warmth spread to their faces and hands. Bobby wriggled his fingers in front of the flames, then winced when his wrist gave him grief.
They sat in silence, drinking more water. Sam occasionally got up to find more logs. The snow cascaded down, hissing when it hit the flames. Utter quiet hung in the forest.
When he was sufficiently warmed up, Sam put up his own tent, laying his sleeping bag out, then returning to the fire.
Bobby met Sam’s eyes. “Thanks for back there.”
“No problem.”
“Kind of lost my mind.”
“It was the cold.”
“Yeah.”
They subsided into silence again, the only noise the occasional growl of Sam’s empty stomach. Neither mentioned food or how hungry they were. They both knew that as soon as it was light, they would set out again.
FIFTY-EIGHT
Dean regained consciousness, his eyes flying open. Again, he couldn’t move. He still sat against the freezing wall, and now he was really cold. He had lost all sensation in his toes and fingers. His breath frosted in the air, and he could feel a rime of ice around his mouth.
Across from him, Don still lay on his stomach. Dean couldn’t see his face anymore.
In the other corner, the body of the man the aswang had fed on had been flipped on its back, puncture holes covering the bare chest above the heart, stomach, and lungs. Another hole, not sealed, yawned in the temple. Dean could see the empty black inside the skull.
Dean scanned the room, but still didn’t see Grace. Where was she? And what had happened to Susan? He wondered how many people were alive down there, how many victims for Jason to devour to prolong his own life?
“Hey,” he heard from the air vent.
His eyes darted in that direction. Jimmy’s silvery eyes flashed at him in return.
“I couldn’t get out. We have to wait for rescuers.”
“There isn’t time. Don’t you see that?” Dean wanted to shout at Jimmy. “You have to kill Jason.” But even Dean knew that Jason couldn’t be killed. Not until Bobby and Sam brought the weapon.
Dean thought of the other clip in his pocket, of the gun lying by the hallway entrance. Had Jason taken it? He looked at Jimmy, then at the area where the gun was, trying to get his attention.
“He took your gun,” Jimmy said, understanding. “I don’t know where to. I heard that girl crying out, but I couldn’t find her—the one shouting that her leg was trapped? I think she’s in another part of the building, cut off from us. But that’s good. Maybe she’ll be able to get out, or maybe rescuers will spot her faster.”
Dean stared at the thin man’s glowing eyes.
Jimmy looked down, shame creeping over his head. “I’m such a goddamn fool. You know that?”
Dean waited. There wasn’t anything else he could do.
“I wanted to be a hunter so bad. Wanted to go with you guys to hunt that wendigo. Then Jason said I could come when more killings happened, said you guys needed all the help you could get. Only he didn’t take me out hunting. He took me to a nest of vamps outside Dayton. He told them where they could find the infamous Winchesters, and left me there as a little treat to sweeten the deal.” He sighed, gritting his teeth.
“Suckers near bled me dry, then they turned me. I got away when they were gearing up to leave for Point Reyes. They went out there to kill your brother and Bobby.” His brow furrowed. “Now I’m one of those things. But I didn’t want to leave you alone out here with Jason.” He stuck his chin out defiantly. “And I wanted to kill the son of a bitch.”
Dean breathed in the gloom, alarmed by Jimmy’s news about the vampires. At least Dean knew Sam and Bobby had made it out okay. Sam hadn’t mentioned anything about it on the phone. Maybe they’d missed them.
Dean’s own situation was dire, too. The aswang could eat its way through all the people trapped down here and Bobby and Sam might not even know they were buried yet. Again, he wondered how long it had been since the avalanche. He looked to Jimmy, hoping he could tell him, but this time the vampire failed to pick up what Dean was thinking.
“I just don’t know how to do it,” Jimmy continued. “I was going to lure him outside. He’s vulnerable to cold. I know that. He was kneeling over you at your camp in the forest, about to attack while you slept, when he saw me and slashed at me,
but I got away. He got me pretty good, though. Left a hell of a blood trail. He wandered around in the snow and got lost. I did it twice, luring him out like that, but it didn’t kill him. I think it came close, though.” He shifted his position, staring down at Dean. “But I can’t find any way out of this place.”
Dean blinked, eyes searching the gloom of the room for anything that could help him. This was ridiculous. He was paralyzed once again, and seriously doubted Jason would be careless a second time. Right now, his hopes rested on a clip of ammo with no gun, a missing ranger who wasn’t a ranger, and a vampire in an air duct.
He heard the now-familiar sound of something being dragged along the hallway. In an instant, Jimmy shimmied back the way he came and fell silent.
Jason appeared, pulling someone along. Dean’s heart sank when he saw the short crop of blonde hair. It was Grace.
Grace’s terrified eyes found Dean’s in the gloom. She was paralyzed, too. Jason dragged her over by Don and dumped her. Dean shut his eyes as Jason turned.
Dean heard the aswang crunching along the ruined floor towards him. There was a pause, and Dean could sense Jason standing over him. Dean didn’t open his eyes, but he could feel the weight of his stare.
“You awake?” Jason asked. He slapped Dean hard in the face. Dean forced himself to keep his eyes closed. “I need you awake!”
From the pocket of his parka, Jason pulled out a length of rope. He pushed Dean over on his stomach. His face hit the dirty floor, and he felt the sharpness of a ski binding under his cheekbone. His face flushed with anger at the helplessness of his situation. Was Jason about to feed on him?
But instead of ripping Dean’s jacket open, Jason wrenched his arms behind his back. He bound his wrists, then his ankles, finishing by hog-tying them to each other.
“Wake up, you son of a bitch. I have a question for you.” Jason brutally kicked Dean in the side for emphasis. Then he stormed out of the room, clawed feet clicking on the floor.
Dean tried to see Grace, but too much debris covered the floor for him to get a line of sight on her. He couldn’t see the air vent, either.
Dean took being tied up as a good sign, though. Maybe Jason was going to let the paralysis wear off so Dean could talk. If so, the second it did, hog-tied or not, Dean was going to do everything he could to destroy Jason. If he had to, he’d hack off all Jason’s limbs with his Bowie knife. It would take the son of a bitch a while to recover from that.
Dean lay waiting for the feeling to return to his body.
FIFTY-NINE
Huddled around the tiny fire, Bobby finally felt his bones thawing out. He watched the snow curl upward into the grey sky. He’d never been in a winter storm this bad. Their progress was too slow. They would have reached the resort by now if the snow weren’t so deep.
Sam shivered across from him, sitting with his arms crossed. He stared into the fire, eyes troubled, brow creased. Bobby could guess what terrible visions Sam conjured in that blaze. Hell.
“Sam.” He looked up at Bobby, his gaze haunted. “You’re not there anymore.”
Sam exhaled. “I know. I think I know, anyway.” He pressed his thumb into the palm of his scarred hand.
Bobby worried about him. The more time they spent out here, the more consumed and withdrawn Sam had become. Maybe it was all the quiet that did it to him, but his thoughts seemed to take him over.
After a couple of hours of warmth, the crackling died down. Bobby felt thoroughly thawed out and crawled into his sleeping bag in his tent.
Sam did the same, and a few minutes later, as Bobby zipped up his tent-fly, he asked, “Do you think it’s weird that we haven’t run across Dean’s trail, or that that thing hasn’t attacked us?”
Bobby stared at him over the dying fire. “This storm’s the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s all but wiped out any trail of Dean. Could be the aswang’s trapped in it, too. It may be tougher than hell, but that don’t make it immune to the weather.”
Sam frowned, obviously not satisfied. “I guess so,” he said. “Goodnight.”
Bobby heard Sam close his tent-fly.
Bobby had wondered why the aswang hadn’t attacked, too. Though he wouldn’t admit as much to Sam. They were exposed prime meat and exhausted in the storm, after all. It was possible the aswang didn’t even know they were out there.
Bobby couldn’t sleep. His wrist was giving him fits. He held it outside the tent for a few minutes, letting it cool in the snow, but ultimately he preferred the warmth of the bag. Eventually, he hunkered down inside his sleeping bag’s fleecy depths and pulled out the folder Marta had given him. He’d been carrying it around since they set off, but this was the first moment he’d had to look at it.
Switching on his headlamp, he opened the manila file. Dozens of articles spilled out. Marta had certainly done a lot of ground work. Some pages were photocopies of the diary of the eighteenth-century Spanish missionary, others were copies of old newspaper articles going back to the 1800s.
He flipped through the pages of the old diary, reading account after account of aswangs creeping into villages at night and sucking fetuses out of pregnant women, and kidneys and livers out of men and children. One family’s son had gone missing while out fishing one day. For ten days they searched for him with no luck. Then one day he just wandered back into the village and lay down on his bed. They couldn’t get him to eat or drink anything, and he just thrashed around restlessly, unable to lie still. As the family watched in desperation, he slowly stopped moving altogether. When the village doctor examined him, he found him filled with the organs of other people and had no idea how he could have walked back to the village.
At night, villagers could hear the aswang flying overhead. Wing beats that sounded far off actually meant the creature was close by, ready to strike. Bobby filed that information away in case it came in useful. An old man had rushed out of his house to shout at what he thought was a retreating aswang, and it descended on him, sucking his full stomach right out of his body.
Bobby turned over more pages in the folder. Marta had even managed to dig up an article from the Point Reyes National Seashore bulletin published by the National Park Service. An historical piece, it covered an early shipwreck by Chimney Rock near Drake’s Bay. A Spanish three-masted ship carrying colonists and a few missionaries had crashed up on the rocks in 1863. Only a handful of survivors lived to relate the tale of bad weather. Some talked of a ghost living aboard the ship who would suck the life out of the mariners on stormy nights. The article included a grainy black and white photograph of the survivors, huddled in blankets on the beach. In the near-background, rowboats recovered more passengers and some of the cargo. In the distance, dashed against the rocks, stood the remains of the ship, its skeletal masts reaching up toward the bluffs of Chimney Rock.
Bobby aimed his headlamp at the photograph, scanning the faces of the sailors and passengers. A nun shivered inside a blanket. A tough-looking sailor stared to the left of the cameraman, a haunted look on his face. Another man peered out from a wide-brimmed hat that was pushed low over his forehead. His face was darker than the others, with deep-set eyes and a square jaw. Bobby peered closer. Something was familiar about him. The photo didn’t have very good resolution. He pulled out the magnifying glass on his lensatic compass and held it over the face.
It was Jason.
Gathering up the folder, Bobby rolled over on his side in the sleeping bag. The wind howled at the tent door, flapping the material. The storm showed no signs of slowing down, and already the snow had drifted around his tent. He’d read through the rest of the clippings. Most described grisly murders of people found without organs, or with extra organs sealed up inside them. They happened in small towns along the coast in the 1860s, eventually moving into San Francisco. He’d only found the one photo of Jason, but it was enough.
“Sam!”
He heard him stir in the neighboring tent.
“Yeah?”
“Dean’s really in the dr
ink this time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know who the aswang is. It’s not Grace.”
“Then who?”
“Jason.”
“What?”
“Check this out.”
Bobby unzipped his tent and handed the article over to Sam. He heard an answering zip and felt Sam take the photo. In another moment, light from Sam’s headlamp flooded the dark.
“Oh, my god. It’s him. And look at the date! 1863.”
Sam read over the article.
“What I want to know,” Bobby said, propping himself up on one elbow, “is how the hell he infiltrated a hunter’s bar?”
“He did a damn fine job. I believed him.”
“Me, too.”
“He knew dad. Or said he did.”
“And Bill Harvelle, and Ellen and Jo.”
“Even Ash and his mullet,” Sam added. “He was good.” Sam went quiet for a minute. “Dean has no idea.”
“Maybe he knows by now. We haven’t talked to him for a long time.”
“How long did you say it would take us to get to the resort?”
“Maybe we’ll reach it tomorrow, if the weather stays this good.”
“We’ve got to pick up the pace, Bobby.”
Bobby knew Sam was right, but unfortunately, they were already pushing themselves as much as they could. The weather held them at its mercy. Showing up a little late was better than not showing up at all because they were buried under ten feet of snow. But that didn’t make him any less impatient at how long it was taking to get up there.
SIXTY-ONE
Dean lay in the darkness, ears tensed for the slightest sound. He hadn’t heard Susan cry out for hours. Maybe Jimmy was right, maybe she’d gotten out. The venom had made him doze off a couple of times, he was pretty sure. He’d lost all sense of time, and the coldness of the trash-littered floor had seeped into his bones. He’d started shivering violently about an hour ago. He concentrated on staying awake. The space was so cramped that oxygen was getting slim now. He couldn’t get a deep enough breath.
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