THIRTY-FIVE

“Deus, et Peter Domini nostri Jesu Christi, invoco nomen sanctum...”

The state police cruiser hit a bump, and through the shooting pain Dean gripped the microphone harder, holding it to his lips. He could hear his own voice broadcast through the loudspeaker on top of the cruiser. The volume was turned up as loud as it could go, crackling out where the whole world could hear it.

“et clementiam tuam supplex exposco: ut adversus hunc...”

“Is it working?” Daniels shouted.

Without pausing to answer, Dean pointed out at the partially collapsed railroad shed that lay straight in front of them, sixty yards away. The sheriff gunned the accelerator, tearing up clumps of scorched battlefield dirt, swerving to the right and then bringing them back on course.

The demons surrounding the railroad shed were already recoiling, falling off their horses, collapsing to the ground in waves. They threw back their heads, wafts of thick vapor spewing out of mouths, wrenching their bodies into convulsions as they departed, swirling upward. The atmosphere around the shed was beginning to stain with a thick and sooty patina of airborne grime, like the polluted sky of a Midwestern factory town.

“Keep going,” Daniels said. “Don’t stop.”

Dean didn’t stop.

“et omnem immundum spiritum, qui vexat hoc plasma tuum...”

The Rituale Romanum spilled from his lips automatically, without requiring conscious thought. Seeing the bastards go down like this always got him jazzed, triggering each line of Latin so that there was no hesitation, no interruption.

The cruiser swung up in front of the shed, stopping just short of running over the bodies that now lay strewn over the grass in the entryway.

“Over there!” Sheriff Daniels said. “Look!”

Dean snapped his head to the side and saw what she was talking about. Some of the demons—whole detachments of them, it looked like—were covering their ears, running and escaping into the woods. So he kept going.

“mihi auxilium praestare digneris. Per eumdem Dominum”

The Rituale overtook some of them before they could get out of hearing distance, but others vanished into the trees.

In the meantime, something else was happening.

Some of the Civil War re-enactors—those that hadn’t been possessed and were still trying to fight their way off the battlefield—were coming face-to-face with their demon-possessed brothers-in-arms. The result was eerily similar the confusion and chaos that typified actual battles. Dean saw one of them run up to a demon dressed as a Confederate soldier, approaching the man with both hands outstretched in a “you remember me” gesture. The demon’s response was to stab the man directly in the heart, dropping him and stepping over his bloody corpse.

Daniels slammed on the brakes, skidding to a halt. Dean finished the first portion of the exorcism. He could see inside the shed now. The demons were gone, reduced to a scrum of foul-smelling murk that was eddying lazily out of the holes in the roof.

Dean jumped out of the car, wincing but not stopping. Through the thick clouds of the demon-smog, he saw Sam slouched over on the floor in what looked like a lake of blood. There was a girl slumped next to him—Sarah Rafferty, he realized. They seemed to be holding each other up. All around them, re-enactors lay bleeding in the dirt, pale and motionless like heaps of gore-stained operating room laundry. It was impossible to say which—if any—were still alive.

Or, for that matter, which ones had died fighting off the demons, and which were evacuated meat-suits that the demons had left behind.

“Sammy!” Dean made his way over. “Oh, dude...”

“It’s okay,” Sam said. “Not as bad as it looks.”

“That good, ‘cause it looks pretty freakin’ bad.”

Sam shook his head.

“What about you? McClane shot you.”

“Misfire. Flesh wound.”

“Lucky break.” He stiffened a little, looked around. “Where is McClane anyway?”

“I must have smoked his ass with the Rituale,” Dean said. “Figured you heard that part.”

“No.” Sam’s expression was bleak. “McClane got out of earshot before the exorcism took hold. With a bunch of his soldiers.”

Dean’s eyes widened. “What?”

They both looked over at Sheriff Daniels. The expression on her face was a combination of disappointment and alarm.

“They’re out there, and they—” she began, then her voice broke off. “You found it?” She said, peering past Sam.

She reached past him to the floor of the shed, grabbed a loose stretch of bandage and picked up the last uncut coil of noose from the ground. She held it at arm’s length, as if afraid to get too close to it, yet unable to put it down.

“The last loop. It’s still intact.”

Sam nodded.

“One of the men found it out there. Put it on a wounded soldier as a tourniquet.”

“Not a good choice.”

“Tell me about it,” Sam grunted.

“But...” Daniels was turning the noose over in her fingers, examining it for flaws., “it’s good for us.”

“What? Why?”

“The seventh coil is the most powerful one in the noose. If we can get it back to its reliquary intact, lock it down in the basement of the church, we can stop the effects of the noose.”

“How do you know all this?” Sam asked.

“She’s the chosen descendant of the original guardian of the noose,” Dean parroted. “Sworn to keep it locked up in a demon-proof room.” And, off Sam’s perplexed reaction: “I talked to Cass.”

“Tommy McClane and I share a common ancestor,” Daniels said, “that much, you probably figured out. But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As much as I want to keep the noose locked away, McClane wanted to get it out—even before he was possessed. He coveted its magic, and it made him an appealing vessel for the lesser demons that took him over.

“I’ve returned it to the reliquary before, after finding it on Dave Wolverton’s corpse.” She fell silent a moment. “But what’s their endgame?”

“They want me to be Lucifer’s vessel,” Sam said bluntly. He let the words lie there.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s a long story,” Dean interjected, “and a pretty ugly one.”

He drew in a breath, bolstered by what Daniels had told them. “So all we have to do is put the last coil back in the reliquary? How easy is that?”

“Not easy at all.” The sheriff gazed out of the open side of the wrecked railway shed, across the smoking battlefield and eastward toward town. “There’s still an army of demons between us and the church, ready to do whatever it takes to stop us.”

“What about our army?” Sarah Rafferty asked. “Those soldiers out there. Can’t they help?”

“You’ve seen what those things can do,” Dean said. “What do you think?”

Real hopelessness flashed through her expression, making her look even more pale and exhausted.

“Then what...?” she began.

Sam bent down and picked up a musket.

“We bring the fight to them.”

“With what,” Dean asked, “replica guns?”

“Demon weapons kill demons, too,” Sam said. “I saw it happen, out on the battlefield, when I turned that siege cannon around on one of them.” He looked his brother squarely in the face. “And they run on blood. Demon blood.”

Dean gaped at him, unable to articulate or even identify the bolt of harsh, vivid emotion that he experienced just hearing those words from his brother.

Anger?

Distrust?

Neither of those words came close. Glancing at his brother, he saw that Sam was experiencing an even more gut-level reaction. He looked paralyzed with fear.

“That’s what Rufus told us at the beginning of all this—that the weapons ran on blood,” Dean said finally. “He didn’t say it was demon blood, though. I hate that stuff.”

“You’ve never tasted it,” Sam said evenly.

“So we find a demon,” Daniels cut in, “and we make it bleed. Where’s the problem in that?”

“You know how it is—there’s never one around when you need it,” Dean muttered.

Then Sam looked over at the pile of bloody bandages that had been held in place by the last coil of the noose—the remains of the re-enactor’s field dressing.

“I think I’ve got us covered,” he said.