SIX

No sulphur, Sam noted, sniffing the air. It wasn’t a demon.

He kicked at the shards of glass that littered the scummy tile floor of the apartment’s tiny bathroom. The intruder had been thorough, upending or smashing just about every object in the small space that wasn’t built into the floor. They even smashed the toilet, Sam realized. The bathroom mirror had also been broken, which accounted for all the glass on the floor. Just what we need, he thought, more bad luck. Sam closed the water valve leading to the sputtering half-toilet.

It wasn’t like there was much to steal. They had been whisked through time with only the clothes on their backs and the contents of their pockets. Who had done this? Were there angels here too? Sam wondered, a nervous chill running through him.

He felt helpless. Lost in an unfamiliar time and place, with all his usual tools unavailable to him, and the end of the world in sight. Because of me, he remembered. I did this.My fear, my weakness, brought on the end for everybody. In these moments, when the guilt overwhelmed him, and images of the billions who would die filled his mind, Sam craved the blood. It didn’t make any sense. Demon blood had given him strength, but it had also clouded his judgment. It had made him turn his back on Dean, the only person who could ever truly understand Sam’s situation.

It had made him start the Apocalypse.

Despite all of that, Sam craved it for one simple reason: it made him feel powerful. The demon blood unlocked something deep within him, something that had been left there by Azazel, the yellow-eyed demon who had killed their mother, Mary Winchester, and marked Sam as part of his growing army of special, part-demonic children. Sam was the only one left alive. Was that why I was chosen to be Lucifer’s vessel? Because Azazel made me this way? Because I was the most special of the special? Or simply because I survived?

Sam moved cautiously back to the main room, pushing those uncomfortable thoughts from his mind. The lock on the front door didn’t show any signs of being forced, though it had been difficult to open. Sam was definitely paranoid enough to have checked the locks in both the door’s handle and the deadbolt when he left a few hours earlier. He scanned the main room of the apartment for other entry points. There was a small, metal-barred window overlooking the street.

Looking down, Sam saw the bustle of a New York street at midday. The window was high enough up that it would take a ladder and some patience to get to it, making it unlikely someone would be able to break in without attracting attention. Not that Sam was sure the good people of New York would bat an eyelash at broad-daylight larceny, but the window’s metal bars were still firmly in place.

Attached to the main room was a small kitchenette, much like the ones in motels that the Winchesters had become intimately familiar with over the last few years. Scratch that, Sam thought, I’ve become familiar with. Dean never, ever cooked... unless you counted assembling bread and shoplifted deli meat as cooking. Even when they were kids and Dean was ostensibly the caretaker, Sam had had to fend for himself.

Inside the kitchenette was a window, taller than the one in the living room, and covered by a garish red curtain. Pushing the curtain aside, Sam saw the rusted metal of a fire escape. Mystery solved.

Put bars on the inaccessible window, but don’t even put a lock on the fire escape? Different time, Sam thought. The question now was the motivation for the break-in. Sam and Dean didn’t look rich, or important. Could someone already know about us? About our mission here?

Sam briefly considered keeping the burglary to himself and avoiding Dean’s inevitable freak-out. The boys had spent a considerable portion of their time together on the run—from law enforcement, vampires, shapeshifters, demons, Hellhounds... and now the forces of Heaven. Knowing they were being followed after less than a day in 1954 wasn’t going to go over well.

Sam reached for his BlackBerry, realizing again as he did so that it wouldn’t work. Living without technology is a bitch. How did Don Draper do it? But calling Dean wouldn’t have been an option anyway, since his BlackBerry wasn’t in his pocket.

It was the one thing he had left in the rented apartment, knowing that it would be useless in 1954. Stupid, he berated himself. It was a rookie mistake, one his father would never have made. Sam checked his other pockets, finding his wallet intact alongside a pack of gum. Reaching into his jacket pocket, Sam’s heart sank. Something else was missing, and it was a much bigger deal than a useless cell phone.

Ruby’s knife.

The one weapon the boys had had with them had vanished from the inside pocket of Sam’s jacket somewhere between the library and the apartment. It was, as far as Sam and Dean knew, one of a kind.

And now it was gone.

Dean may not have been the smartest Winchester, and he certainly wasn’t the one you wanted to help translate an ancient document, but after years of digging through yellowed lore books, he had picked up a few things. He knew, for example, that when he saw crazy-ass lettering, he was better off calling Sam than trying to figure it out himself. Dean figured his value came more from his ‘give ’em hell’ attitude than from his G.E.D.

The symbols on the side of the crate certainly fell into the ‘crazy-ass’ category. Was it Hebrew, or something older? A crate with biblical text on it getting dropped off at the Waldorf? This is almost too easy, Dean thought. All he had to do was follow it to its destination, grab the scroll, and get clear of the place before any more hot girls saw him in his embarrassing monkey suit.

Trouble was, Dean had already lost the crate. The workman who had delivered it must have slipped into the service elevator while Dean was sorting all of this out in his head.

He hurried along the loading dock to the service elevator’s oversized doors. As he reached out to press the ‘down’ button, assuming that’s where the crate was headed, the doors sprang open.

“A lot of guests need their luggage taken to the loading dock?” asked the mustached man who was waiting in the elevator. Dean recognized him as one of the asshole desk clerks from upstairs.

“Uh, yeah, lady wanted to see the...” Dean trailed off, looking around the poorly lit dock for anything that could possibly interest a guest, “the place where we keep the carts.” He gestured weakly toward a line of derelict luggage carts parked in the corner.

The clerk stared hard at Dean for an excruciatingly long moment, then cracked a wry smile.

“Kind of an unspoken rule that we wait until our shift’s over, buddy,” the man said, patting Dean on the back. “If a lady wants to see your, uh, cart, she’ll still wanna see it after you’re done working.” He pulled Dean into the elevator by the shoulder, but Dean resisted.

“Maybe give me a minute here?” Dean asked.

“You got a phone call. Your dad.”

Dean shrugged the man’s hand off his shoulder and forced open the closing elevator doors. John Winchester had been dead for years, or, depending on how you looked at it, was not even born yet.

“My what?” Dean demanded, suddenly deadly serious.

“Or brother? Or your cousin? I don’t know. Some guy. Sounded kind of annoyed. And annoying, for that matter.” The man pulled Dean’s hand off the elevator door, which continued to close. “And here’s a pro tip. Don’t actually try anything on those carts. You’ll end up rolling all over the place, the lady will bonk her head, and it’ll be all tears and whining for the rest of the night. Trust me.”

It wasn’t a dignified position to be in, but Sam didn’t have a choice. He was on his hands and knees, clawing around the base of the phone booth for dropped change. He had only had a few coins, and Dean was taking his sweet time to get to the phone. Probably got distracted, Sam thought. If he’s with a woman...

“Sam, that you?” a voice sounded through the phone.

“Dean! I’ve been waiting a—”

“Yeah, ’bout that, couldn’t you have waited a little longer to check in on me, Mom? Made me lose a lead on our scrolls.”

“I’m not checking in,” Sam said, aggravated. “I thought you’d want to know we got robbed.”

“We? I didn’t get robbed. All I own here is this stupid hat, and I sure as hell still have that.”

“Our apartment was broken into—”

“What?”

“They tore the place apart.” Sam started to pace with the phone, then realized there was only a foot of space for him to move either way in the booth. He suddenly understood why cordless phones had been invented.

“Calm down, big guy. You sound a little pissed.” Dean said, lowering his voice.

“They took... my BlackBerry.”

“Yeah, that’s rough Sammy,” Dean said, obviously faking sympathy. “Seriously though, who the hell cares? Who you planning on texting in 1954?”

“You don’t get it,” Sam responded. “They took my 2010 phone, full of 2010 technology, meaning we could have a serious Back to the Future II situation.”

“What, so Biff is going to steal our Delorean?”

“No, we could seriously alter the timeline. Introduce things now that aren’t supposed to exist for decades—”

“Am I gonna have to kiss Mom?” Dean said, his smirk evident even over the phone.

“Dean.” Sam knew he had to break Dean out of his streak or he was going to be hearing Marty McFly jokes for the rest of the day. “Please.”

“Fine. Remember what Cass told me, though—whatever we do, that’s what happened. We can’t change history, we can just live in it for a bit. We break something, it was always broken, that’s how it was—always.”

“Cass told you that because he was trying to prove a point. Why would Don send us back if we couldn’t change anything?” Sam asked. “If the scroll really was destroyed in 1954, we are going to change that.”

“Well don’t count on the d-bag coming by to clarify any of it.”

“There’s something else,” Sam admitted. “Whoever broke in was thorough. Not just a smash and grab job.”

“So they were motivated. Had something particular in mind,” Dean said.

“Could someone have overheard us, someone else who wants the scroll?”

Dean exhaled loudly. “This is gonna be harder than I thought.”

“In 2010, the last thing I loaded on the phone was the Wikipedia page for the scrolls. Probably no one will ever be able to recover it. But what if they can? What if there is someone out there—”

“Who is a technological genius fifty years ahead of their time, and also cares about the scrolls? I don’t think so,” Dean said.

Sam was silent. He knew he had to tell Dean the rest of the story, but couldn’t face letting his brother down. Finally, he gulped down a breath and bit the bullet.

“There’s one more thing that’s missing. Ruby’s knife.”

“Damn it, Sam—”

“I know,” Sam replied, trying to head off Dean’s inevitable tirade.

“You left the knife in the apartment? What were you thinking? I thought I was supposed to be the dumbass?”

“I didn’t leave it. Someone must have taken it off of me.”

“What, so now we have ninjas after us?” Dean asked, exasperated.

“There was this girl, in the hallway...” Sam trailed off, letting Dean’s imagination fill in the rest.

“That’s just perfect. I mean, we’ve been porked before, but this takes the cake.” Dean took a breath. “Sammy? You there?”

“Yeah, Dean. I’m here.”

“With or without the knife, we gotta move forward,” Dean said, then added in an undertone. “This crate I saw, it had a bunch of markings on it, I think in Hebrew.”

“Sounds right.”

“My point is, if the package is in Hebrew, imagine what language the scroll itself will be in—”

“You’re just thinking of that now?” Sam chided. “According to the books I found, similar texts from that region and time period were written in early Herodian square script, but that’s more the symbology than the language. The language would be Aramaic.”

“Save it, Dan Brown. My point is, how are we gonna read this thing?”

“I’m working on it,” Sam said. “Let’s worry about finding the scroll first.”

“Good chat, Sam,” his brother responded, an edge in his voice. “I’ll try to track down the scroll before the Hamburglar catches up with me. Try not to lose your pants.”

“Wait,” Sam spat out, “when are we meeting up?”

“Meet me back here when my shift ends. Eight o’clock.”

Sam heard Dean hang up.

He stepped out of the phone booth and back into the swirling storm of people outside. I guess Dean can handle himself for a few hours, Sam thought, turning south, away from the Waldorf and back toward the library.

Two hours later, Sam was no closer to speaking Aramaic. Being in one of the biggest libraries in the world, the texts were certainly available, but the language was far more complex than Sam had imagined. Without help, it could take months to get an accurate translation.

I wonder if Bobby knows Aramaic? It wasn’t that crazy a notion, since a large portion of the biblical lore books that Bobby studied were in ancient languages. Not that we have Bobby here, Sam thought. For a brief moment, he considered looking up the Singers in the phone book. Bobby was born in the fifties; it was possible that at that very moment an infant Bobby was first learning to scowl.

Sam again wished that he had gotten more information from Don before being sent back. What were they supposed to do once they found the War Scroll? Translate it in the past, or hide it Bill & Ted-style for their future selves to find?

The boys didn’t often get a chance to plan ahead, so when the opportunity presented itself, Sam decided he was going to take it. He found a phone book in the lobby and used his last ten cents to call the American Bible Society—apparently it was home to the greatest concentration of biblical texts outside of the Vatican. It was as good a place to start as any.