TWENTY-FIVE

Dean jumped out and ran around the back.

He grabbed the tarp and ripped it back. What he saw beneath it took several seconds to understand. There were two figures struggling in the shadows, one pinning the other down, smashing its victim with a series of fast, brutal punches. The screams grew louder, more intense.

“Leave him alone!” Dean shouted and gripped the attacker around one arm, swinging him back. As the figure spun around, he realized that the arm he was holding onto belonged to Nate McClane.

“What...?”

The boy gave him a savage grin. Dean turned to stare at the half-conscious face of the victim looking back from the bottom of the truck. He realized that he was looking down at Sarah Rafferty.

“Sarah?”

She groaned, lips barely managing to shape the words.

“Help...”

“What did you do to her?” Dean asked, spinning back around to look at Nate.

The boy was still grinning, his lips peeled back to reveal every tooth in his mouth.

His eyes flicked black.

Up in front, both doors of the pickup flew open. Sam jumped down and a moment later Tommy McClane stepped out on his side, sidling unhurriedly toward the back of the truck.

McClane’s grin matched his son’s. The insides of his eyes seemed to have filled with thick black ink. A shroud of moonlight lay over him like an unearthly cowl.

“We took the girl to play with,” McClane said, “just for fun. Kind of a nice reward, don’t you think? Sure as hell beats an e-book.”

“You did all this just so you could get your hands on the noose?” Dean said.

“Let’s just say that Judas and his Collectors were a little too selfish when it came to letting everybody have a turn with it,” the McClane-demon sneered. “So me and my kin just started looking around for it ourselves.”

Dean thought of the demons they’d encountered on the hillside, and the ones out on the country highway.

“Your kin.”

“We’ve got plans,” McClane said. “Big plans.”

Dean shook his head.

“Dammit! I knew I had you pegged right the first time.”

“We could never have set foot inside that room.” McClane nodded. “But you did it for us.” He glanced at the Nate-demon. “Go ahead. Finish her off.”

Nate lunged toward Sarah Rafferty with a snarl. Sam grabbed him by the shoulders and slammed his face into the side of the truck. The demon’s head bounced off and slumped away.

He felt something ripped away from him and realized that the noose was gone—he’d lost it when he’d grabbed the demon.

McClane had it now. Almost faster than Sam’s eyes could process, the demon lashed out with it, looping the coil around Dean’s wrist and yanking the blade from his hand.

Sam started to charge toward McClane, and pain exploded through his head from behind, blasting his vision into a kaleidoscope of shattered rhinestone. When he staggered around, he saw Nate grinning at him again, rubbing his fist. And behind the demon, he glimpsed Sarah crawling away, inching slowly, painfully, away into the darkness.

Off to his left, McClane had Dean on his knees and was kicking him. Dean struggled to his feet and McClane kicked him again, harder. The cold clatter of his laugh was like someone spilling a bag of marbles across a museum floor. There was nothing human in it.

“You ready?” he asked, and Nate nodded. The look of unwholesome eagerness scrawled over the boy’s face was almost obscene.

Raising the knife, McClane stuck its tip into the first of the noose’s coils, shoving it upward. Sam heard a ripping noise as the blade tore through the weave of the hemp.

Black ooze spurted from the rope like drainage from an infected loop of bowel, trickling down McClane’s hands and up to his elbows.

Seeing it, Sam remembered how heavy the rope had felt, and realized that was because it was alive and pulsating, nearly sloshing in Tommy’s hands. He stared as the black substance rose up, shimmering in the night air, moving the way they’d seen it move in the back of the morgue van.

The Moa’ah.

It swirled over their heads and flung itself outward, across the battlefield and up the hill, a streak of greater blackness against the gloom that preceded sunrise.

A sudden eruption of thunder shook the world, lights flashing and shivering over the hillside, illuminating the full curvature of the landscape in a series of silent-movie flickers.

No, Sam realized, not thunder.

Guns.

Up on top of the hill, figures began to appear, manning the siege howitzers that the state police had not been able to bring down. More of them rose up every second.

They seemed to be rising up out of the ground itself.

But they weren’t—the meat-suits they wore were the bodies of the re-enactors who had refused to abandon the battlefield.

* * *

“Ah.” Reaching the final loop, McClane changed the angle of the blade, as if anticipating greater resistance. “The seventh coil. Now you’re going to see why Judas wants to keep the noose so closely protected.”

Dean swung at him.

It should have worked. McClane wasn’t even looking at him—he was still apparently absorbed by the task at hand. But when Dean’s fist came at him, McClane switched hands with the noose, then reached up almost casually and gripped Dean by the wrist, swinging him around sideways and applying pressure to his radial nerve.

A thin lancet of icy-hot pain sprang up Dean’s arm and his knees went out from under him, dropping him to the ground.

“Nate?” McClane called out. From inside the cab of the truck, Nate stepped out holding what Sam Winchester recognized as a Civil War musket from the gun rack. Wielding the gun with ease, the boy aimed and pulled the trigger. There was a flat, eardrum-rending report as the muzzle-flash ignited the air in front of him. Dean flailed backward, twisted and was landed face-first in the dirt.

“Dean!” Sam shouted.

McClane turned and eyed him speculatively.

“I hope you’re gonna be a little tougher to crack,” he said, drawing the demon-blade, tipping it back and throwing it at Sam at point-blank range.