SIXTEEN

Bobby Singer was about to make dinner for himself and the boys when the phone rang. He grabbed his new cordless appliance off the wall-mount and held it up to his ear.

“Hello?”

In response, the phone rang again.

With a sigh, he held it in front of his face and pushed the “talk” button.

“Hello?”

It was John Winchester.

“What the hell you tryin’ to pull, Bobby?”

Now Bobby scowled, wondering why, exactly, he put up with this sort of crap.

Voices from the living room wafted into the kitchen.

“Deeeeean! That’s my pen!”

“So get another pen, Dexter Sammy.”

He ran his other hand through his thick hair.

“I ain’t pullin’ a damn thing, John,” he replied, holding his temper as best he could. “What the hell are you talkin’ about?”

“You send me out here, ship me this sword, and I’m stuck flailin’ around like an idiot. The damned thing doesn’t work.”

Bobby started to rub his eyes, but noticed that there were tufts of red hair between his fingers. He was starting to go bald, and in his uncharitable moments he blamed it entirely on John.

“Look, why don’t you go talk to that Berkeley professor that gave Bartow the thing?”

There was a long pause before he heard John’s reply.

“What’s his name?”

“Marcus Wallace.”

Bobby went into the living room. Dean was standing on his tiptoes and holding his left hand as high in the air as he could—Sam’s pen clutched between his fingers. Sam, for his part, was jumping up into the air trying to grab it from his much taller older brother.

Shaking his head, Bobby rummaged through the papers on his desk.

“Hang on—okay, here it is,” he added as he liberated the letter that had been packed away among Bartow’s effects. Finding Wallace’s direct line at the UC-Berkeley campus, he read it off.

“All right,” John said, “I’ll give him a call. If he doesn’t pan out, though, I’m gonna need to get creative. It’s that, or end up shake-and-baked. I’ll talk to you later, Bobby.”

“The boys are just fine, by the way,” Bobby said quickly, before John could hang up.

Lowering his arm, Dean turned toward Bobby.

“Is that Dad?”

Sam took advantage of the distraction to snatch the pen from his brother’s hand with a piercing “Ha!” of triumph, but Dean barely noticed.

John sounded impatient on the other end of the line.

“I figured they were, since if they weren’t, you’d have said something,” he said. “I need to go, the long-distance charges are murder.”

With that, he hung up.

“Can I talk to him?” Dean asked pleadingly.

Pushing the “talk” button again to close the connection on his end, Bobby let his hand drop to his side.

“Sorry, Dean, he, uh—was on his way out the door. But he told me to tell you both to behave yourselves and do what I tell you. And that he loves you.”

Tilting his head, Dean gave Bobby a sidelong glance.

“Did he really say that?”

“’Course he did. So I’m tellin’ you right now, boy—stop stealing from your brother. You need a pen, ask me for one, all right?”

Dean nodded.

“Okay. I did all my homework already anyhow.”

Now it was Bobby’s turn to give Dean a sidelong glance.

“Really?”

Unlike Bobby, the ten year-old boy wilted.

“Well, most of it.”

“That’s what I thought. You get it done before I’m finished cookin’, all right?”

“Okay.”

Dean sat down next to Sam on the couch. Sam had gone back to the homework he’d been working on when Dean stole his pen.

Dean looked up at Bobby again.

“Can I have a pen?”

Bobby grinned.

“Sure.” He opened the top drawer of his desk and fished out a ballpoint he’d gotten from one of the hotels he’d stayed in during a hunt.

He handed it over, and headed back into the kitchen.

“It won’t write!” came the voice of a ten year-old. “This pen sucks!”

As he went into the fridge for butter to spread onto the pan, Bobby decided it was the entire Winchester family that was making him bald.

John had imagined that a college professor’s office would be a large room with a grand wooden desk, a leather chair, and walls lined floor-to-high-ceiling with bookcases.

So when he arrived at the University of California Berkeley campus and went to the building on Fulton Street that housed the recently renamed Asian Studies Department, he was strangely disappointed.

Marcus Wallace’s office was a tiny rectangle of a room with no windows and less air. A dull gray metal desk sat against one wall, taking up so much space that the professor’s simple leather chair butted against the opposite wall, leaving room only for one small particle-board bookcase in the corner.

The desk was covered with papers, some of which were precariously stacked in two wireframe in-boxes. Otherwise the desk boasted a phone—on which Wallace was speaking when John entered—and a personal computer screen, though the keyboard had been buried under more papers. Bright green letters glowed from the monitor, shining on the side of Wallace’s face and contrasting oddly with the fluorescent bulb overhead.

The office’s walls had probably been painted yellow once, but had faded to a dirty mustard.

Wallace himself was a pleasant-faced man who looked seriously out of place in an Asian Studies Department, with his squared-off Afro that was cut close to the skin at the temples.

While talking on the phone, he gestured for John to sit in the folding chair crammed between the desk and the wall next to the door.

“Yes, I understand that, but—” he said, then fell silent. “Yes, I know that, but— The students aren’t going to—” More silence, and he was beginning to look pissed off. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Okay, sir. Good-bye.”

Slamming the phone down with considerable force, Wallace snarled at it for a second, then composed himself.

“Sorry about that,” he said sincerely. “We just got a new department chairman, and his solution to everything seems to be to change how things’ve been done for the twenty years I’ve been here, whether it’s a good idea or not. Swear to God, man, academic politics makes the folks in Washington look like pikers.” He took a breath and held out his hand. “Sorry— I’m Marcus Wallace. You must be John Winchester.”

John accepted the firm handshake.

“I guess you talked to Bobby after we spoke?”

Wallace nodded.

“So the hook sword didn’t work as advertised?”

“That’s an understatement,” John said somewhat bitterly.

“Take it easy, man—it isn’t Bobby’s fault. Ever since Doragon Kokoro first showed up, some twenty years back, I’ve been trying to find out everything I could. I helped Bartow out, and since then, I’ve been doing research up the yin-yang to try to find out more. But it isn’t easy.”

He started rummaging through the papers on his desk while he continued.

“Nevertheless, I think I may have found something that might be of some use. Where is it?” After going through a few more sheafs, Wallace finally found what he was looking for. “Here it is!”

It was a booklet, about half the size of John’s own journal in breadth and width. At first he thought Wallace was handing it to him upside down and backward, before he remembered that most Asian languages were written right-to-left.

Flipping through it briefly, John saw the kanji characters, along with some line art that John might have found pretty under better circumstances.

“What the hell’m I supposed to do with this?” he asked.

Wallace shook his head quickly and grabbed the booklet back.

“Sorry, man—I forget sometimes that not everybody reads the language.” He flipped through to a back page. “Here we go.” He handed it back to John and pointed at the drawing that appeared there. “I’m guessing a picture will be worth a few thousand words.”

Again taking the booklet, John saw line art that took up the entire bottom half of the page: a man holding a very familiar-looking hook sword, crouched in a ready stance facing off against a man who was wreathed in flames while wielding a katana.

Of particular note to John was that the kanji characters on the hook sword were glowing.

Looking up, he saw that Wallace was nodding toward the book.

“If this thing’s the real deal—and I’ve been translating this sucker for a while now—then it isn’t the sword, it’s the engravings.” Turning away, he used his forearm to sweep the papers off the keyboard, and began typing. “I went ahead and wrote out the characters on the sword phonetically for you. The next time you face the spirit, you need to focus your concentration on it and then cast the engraved spell.

“My guess is that that’ll get rid of Doragon Kokoro.”

“Your guess?” John didn’t like the sound of that.

Wallace regarded him levelly.

“Look, man, you and I both know that this sort of thing doesn’t always come with an instruction manual.”

With a sigh, John relented.

“Yeah, okay.”

Rising to his feet, the professor gestured toward the door.

“C’mon, the printer’s down the hall.”

John followed him out of the cramped office and into the cramped hallway to a table that sat next to a bunch of wooden mail slots with people’s names written on small white labels affixed to the front. One of them, John noted, had Wallace’s name, there was an envelope propped up in the slot. The professor nabbed it as they walked past.

The printer was a daisy-wheel that worked very slowly, but it was still done by the time they arrived. The sheet it spat out contained only a few words.

Wallace pulled a lever that let loose the paper, and yanked it out.

“Here you go, Mr. Winchester. Hold the sword near Doragon Kokoro, chant this, and stand back.”

John took the proffered paper.

“And if that doesn’t work?”

Wallace’s face broke into a wry grin.

“Run like hell?”

John rolled his eyes.

“Thanks a lot.”