TWENTY-ONE

On the floor of the room, Sam was helplessly staring up at Dean. His face, formerly white, had begun tingeing a cyanic shade of blue as the first signs of irreversible oxygen deprivation sank deeper into his features.

Finding a loose handle, he picked the noose up and dropped it back into the box. Then Dean whirled around and splashed the white beam of his flashlight around the room.

When did I lose the knife?

Wouldn’t he have heard it, if it had fallen out of his pocket onto the metal floor?

What if I lost it earlier? Outside, or up in one of the other rooms?

He looked back at the floor. Sam was tilting slightly to one side now, unable even to sit upright. The look of panic had started sliding away, along with his sense of awareness.

Dean hunched down and lifted his brother back up, searching for a spark of life in his eyes.

He’s going to pass out, a mental voice yammered. He’s not getting any air. I have to do something.

He flashed hard to something an ambulance driver had told him once.

When you’re dealing with a choking victim, you don’t have time to mess around. Time is brain.

There was no time to go looking for the knife.

Desperate, out of options, Dean swung his brother in front of him, wrapping his arms around him from behind. He made a fist with one hand and locked his other hand around it, thrusting up and into Sam’s diaphragm.

At first nothing happened.

Dean did it again, harder.

Sam made an abrupt hiccuping croak and something flew up and out of his mouth, landing on the floor with a clank.

Sam whooped in a deep, rattling breath.

“You all right?” Dean asked tautly.

Sam managed a weak nod. His eyes and nose were streaming with tears, and dirt streaked his face like warpaint. For a moment he looked about six years old, freshly fallen off his bike with a skinned knee.

“What...” he rasped. “What came out of me?”

Dean aimed his flashlight over the lead-lined floor, training it on the small, wet leather pouch that lay five feet away from them. Its drawstring had come open. A few tarnished silver pieces lay scattered around it, gleaming there like flat, incurious eyes.

“Thirty pieces of silver—shekels of Tyre,” Dean whispered, turning his attention back to the reliquary. “The noose...”

There was a faint clinking noise. He twitched the flashlight back at the bag of silver pieces again.

“Dean?” Sam’s voice came hoarsely. “What...?”

From the far corner came a shuffling noise.

“We’re not alone down here,” Dean said.

He looked at the spilled coins.

A long, slender hand dipped out of the darkness and plucked one of them up.

Dean jerked the flashlight upward to reveal a bearded face, grinning wildly at them.

The figure stepped forward. He was tall and skeletal, and except for his thick black facial hair, his skin appeared almost unnaturally white and smooth. But moist as well—less like porcelain and more like the flesh of a mushroom. From the emaciated hunch of his shoulders, a colorless, shabby-looking cloak hung down to the floor, its hood thrown back. The hem of the figure’s robe dragged on the floor.

“I believe this belongs to me.” Kneeling, the figure began to scrape the silver coins up, depositing them carefully back into the satchel from which they’d spilled. The satchel then disappeared under the cloak.

“Judas?” Dean whispered in disbelief.

“No. I’m more of an aide-de-camp.” The man looked up again, and this time Dean saw his eyes, their orbits stained an absolute, soulless black.

“Great,” Dean said. “Another scum-sucking demon. Just what we—”

“I am not a demon.” The figure’s arms shot forward, taking hold of Dean’s throat and jerking him off his feet and straight up into the air. His flashlight slipped from his fingers and went out. There was a weightless, spinning moment in the dark when Dean had time to think, This is gonna hurt, and then something flat and hard—the floor, the wall—collided with his skull, ringing it like a bell.

His vision doubled, then tripled. Constellations—whole galaxies of stars—rattled through his head, and when he tried to sit up, all he could taste was the coppery trickle of his own blood.

“You sure... you’re not a demon?” he croacked.

“I’m a Collector,” the figure said. “Probably the closest term you have for me is spirit. Except that I inhabit a solid form. Case in point...” He drew back one foot with crazy, stuttering speed and swung it forward, smashing Dean hard in the head.

It was a perfectly placed kick, connecting just above the ear, and Dean felt the world closing down around him fast, like a tent whose poles had been yanked away.

Sam grabbed his flashlight and swept it up until he saw the Collector coming toward him. Its robe swung heavily back and forth, jingling as it walked. As it got closer Sam realized that the garment was loaded with pockets, perhaps hundreds of them, each containing leather pouches and satchels of silver pieces. It had to weigh half a ton.

“Where’s Judas?”

“He couldn’t make it,” the figure responded. “Sends his regards.”

“Is this what you do?” Sam asked. “Go around for all eternity, picking up blood money?”

“At least I didn’t trigger the Apocalypse,” the Collector replied. It smiled. “Not that I’m complaining. My employer is back on the A-list again. Suddenly everybody wants the noose—humanity, lesser demons, witches.” He shrugged, clinking. “It’s a bull market on betrayal.”

Sam looked around. There was only one weapon he could see in the room. He picked up the reliquary and threw it as hard as he could at the creature.

Laughing, the Collector ducked.

The box slammed off the wall and landed between them. The Collector stepped over it and blurred toward him, one arm pinioning forward. When the punch connected, it was with the full weight of all the metal loaded in the sleeves, as if the thing’s entire body was packed with the silver it had been gathering.

Sam’s head jolted backward and bounced off the wall. He dropped the flashlight. Every ounce of light in the room was now gone.

But he could hear something, a sound he recognized.

The scrape of metal against metal. It was a thin, hard sound, and when Sam looked up, he actually saw a few sparks flying along the floor. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for him to glimpse, however briefly, the tip of a gleaming steel blade in the Collector’s pale hand.

“Did you really think that I would just let you traipse into my house,” the voice in the darkness murmured, “with your filthy little weapon?”

A sharp beam of light burst out from the doorway, illuminating the room around them.

“What makes you think it’s your house, you son of a bitch?” Tommy McClane’s voice asked.