SEVEN

The benefits of Dean’s job were manifold. The women he helped to their rooms were uniformly stunning, from which Dean surmised that even in 1954, enough money could buy you beauty. They were also generous. The twenty dollars a week the manager had quoted turned out to be on the very low end. Dean had no idea how much his tips could actually buy, but he imagined it was a lot. He wondered if most people knew such arcane facts—had Dean been out hunting demons on the school day when the kids learned about inflation rates?

The most obvious benefit to the job was access, but that was also the downside. He was tantalizingly close to the scrolls, but he was now under the close supervision of the more dickish of the two desk clerks. After several hours of work, he still hadn’t been able to venture down to the vault.

His opportunity came shortly after sunset, when the clerk finally left the front desk. Dean pushed his luggage cart into the elevator and asked Rick to leave it on the top floor, hoping that nobody would come looking for him this time. Slipping into the employees-only corridor that led away from the ornate lobby, Dean marveled at how quickly the hotel went from world-class to low-class. Water stains ran down the cheap wallpaper, bringing to mind the Winchesters’ usual stomping grounds. While Dean enjoyed the change of pace that the Waldorf represented, the drab familiarity of the hallway helped put him in hunting mode.

Not taking a chance on the service elevator being in use, Dean took the back stairwell. Calling it dank would be an understatement. The bare-bulb lighting was hardly enough to see by, but probably helped cover up the unfortunate state of the stairs themselves.

Toward the base of the stairwell, he heard a low scraping noise and slowed his pace. It sounded like something was being dragged across unfinished cement.

“My God, I...” intoned a man’s voice, before fading to a murmur. Glass clinked against glass, followed by the sound of a bottle slowly pouring out its contents.

Dean padded down a few more steps and craned his head around the corner. He was glad, for once, that Sam wasn’t stomping his heavy feet beside him. There were advantages to being the less muscle-bound Winchester. Despite that, the stair he was perched on felt less than stable.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” the man said, his voice full of quiet desperation. “You know I would never...”

Leaning forward as he listened for a reply, Dean nearly slipped off the crumbling concrete step, and pieces of the slab skittered downward. The voice stopped and moments later Dean heard feet pounding away from him. Crap, he swore under his breath, the noise had clearly spooked the man enough to send him running.

Dean slammed his shoulder through the doorway into the sub-basement hallway, sending a radiating pain through his arm that probably wouldn’t go away for a week. The man hadn’t gotten far, having slipped to the ground less than ten feet from the stairwell.

“Whaddaya doin’, trying to... ugh,” the man said, gulping down air. “Trying to give me a coronary?”

“Slow your roll, dude,” Dean answered as he approached. The man’s face was flush and covered in sweat, and Dean recognized him immediately as the guard who had brought the War Scroll crate into the Waldorf earlier. He also recognized the bottle of Wild Turkey that was upended and dripping onto the cement floor. “Hard day, I take it,” he said, leaning in to read the man’s ID badge. “Mr. McMannon?”

The man shuddered back a sob and lifted the bottle to his lips to swill down what hadn’t spilled.

Dean inclined his head at the sorry sight. “Been there.”

Was it possible that this mess of a guy was responsible for guarding the vault? If so, it was just a matter of keeping him acquainted with that bottle. Dean had no qualms about robbing a passed-out drunk.

“Hasn’t been a great few days for me, either. Hell, hasn’t been a great decade,” he said.

Lumbering to his feet, McMannon gave Dean a wary look.

“Decade just—” he began, then hiccupped, “started.” Clearly, the guard wasn’t ready for a heart-to-heart with an intrusive bellhop.

Dean gave him his best car salesman grin.

“How ‘bout I get us another bottle?”

James McMannon was in control of himself for the time being. He couldn’t exactly recall how he had come to be in the sub-basement, or even what day it was, but at least he felt in control.

He watched the bellhop scurry back up the stairs to get another bottle. Something about the man—was it his smell?—was unsettling. James briefly considered killing him when he returned, but quickly banished the thought. Why would I do that? Why would I even think it? It was then that the image popped back into his mind: his nephew, Barney, head hanging like a rag doll’s, his eyes totally lifeless.

Where had he seen that? Was it a terrible dream? Deep down, a part of James knew that he had done an unspeakable thing—but that part of his brain was currently drowning in Bourbon. At any rate, it wasn’t James that had killed Barney; it was the strange animal living inside him, and that animal seemed to be, for the moment, asleep.

He shook his head to banish the strange thoughts. Now where was that kid with the new bottle of whiskey?

Paranoia was deeply ingrained in the hunter lifestyle, and Sam Winchester had been checking for tails since he was five years old. Walking through the maelstrom of mid-town Manhattan was proving to be unimaginably difficult for him, especially with the knowledge that he’d been followed once that day already.

Double back, wait a few minutes, then keep moving, Sam repeated to himself over and over. It was his father’s mantra, and it was clearly designed for small town America, not the overflowing streets of New York City.

The towering brick building that housed the American Bible Society was located at 57^th Street and Park Avenue, a few blocks north of the Waldorf. Sam had resisted the temptation to check in on his brother while walking past, but he was still feeling the frustration of living without a cell phone. He imagined Dean had already made another attempt to get near the scroll, but it would be a few hours before his shift was over and Sam could find out for sure.

Sam’s contact was waiting for him in the Society’s front lobby. He was a well-built man stuffed into a suit that was too small for him. His thin necktie accentuated the unflattering fit. His arm was in a canvas sling, leading Sam to wonder what sort of trouble the man had gotten himself into.

“Mr. Sawyer?” Sam asked.

The man nodded and gestured toward a set of chairs.

“Please, call me Walter. Have a seat. Can I get you a drink?”

Before Sam could respond, Walter dropped ice cubes into two tumblers and poured amber liquid into each one.

“I regret I couldn’t be more helpful on the telephone,” Walter said as he handed Sam his drink. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re looking for.”

“I’m not sure either, not yet. I’m in the process of buying a religious relic, something of family interest—”

“You’re Jewish?” Walter interrupted with a slight squint.

“No, it’s not... not that, exactly.”

Walter knocked back his drink absently, his attention fully on Sam.

“But you mentioned something about Hebrew relics, Old Testament manuscripts.” He paused for a moment, his eyes asking the obvious question. “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s the ‘family interest’?”

“In-laws,” Sam said with a shrug.

The scholar seemed to accept that, for the moment.

“And once you have acquired the documents, you’ll need them interpreted.”

“Translated,” Sam corrected. “I think biblical interpretation is best left to the individual.”

Walter pulled a crooked half-grin. “Fair enough.” He brushed a lock of his unkempt brown hair from his forehead. “Does this have something to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls?”

Sam was careful to keep his face neutral. “What do you know about the scrolls?” he asked.

“They’re the most important historical discovery of the century,” Walter said with precise, almost rehearsed diction, as if he had said it many times, to many people. “Any century, really. Though whether people accept that is a different matter entirely.”

“It’s not the first apocryphal Old Testament text,” Sam replied, studying Walter’s reaction.

“Apocryphal. What makes it any less relevant than Genesis or Revelations? Or Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, for that matter?” Walter spat with thinly veiled distaste.

“Have you read them? The scrolls?”

Walter didn’t respond immediately, instead he looked into Sam’s eyes as if he was passing judgment, determining whether he was worthy of sharing what he knew of the scrolls.

“No.”

Sam forced a smile and took a sip from his very strong drink. Straight whiskey, he realized. At least it was afternoon. As he set the glass on the nearby end table, he noticed a red blot seeping across Walter’s canvas sling.

“Your arm alright?” he asked, indicating the bloody stain.

Walter glanced at it carelessly. “Ah. I should really be more careful on the subway,” he said, and stood up. “Let’s go to my office and talk about the scrolls.”

The sub-basement of the Waldorf Astoria was spinning around Dean Winchester. His head was rested against the cushion of a tall-back chair, his feet propped up on the security desk outside the hotel’s vault. His sobriety was long since gone.

“You think you’ve had a crap week, let me tell you something, James,” Dean said, gesturing wildly with an almost-empty bottle of vodka, the only liquor he had managed to swipe from the bar upstairs. “I come from... the future.”

For his part, James wasn’t listening to a word of Dean’s rant. He was far more than three sheets to the wind, his pudgy cheeks and eyes were both red, his eyelids drooping with exhaustion.

“The friggin’ future, man.”

James studied his hands intently, as if they were part of somebody else’s body.

“We have this thing, the internet, it’s like porno city. Anything you want. What are you into, man? Asians? They’ve got Asians,” Dean said with a knowing look. Boy did they have Asians.

James’s head drooped toward the floor. Dean, realizing that this was his moment, shut up and watched for any sign that James would snap out of it. Instead, he dropped to the floor entirely, his girth hitting the concrete with a slap.

“Gonna feel that tomorrow,” Dean said as he moved toward the vault door. In his inebriated state, he stumbled over James’s legs and nearly face-planted himself.

The vault was like that of a small bank, with a heavy combination-locked door which no doubt lead into a room full of safety deposit boxes. Dean knew that breaking into the main vault would be relatively straightforward—after all, he had a bit of experience in that regard—but finding the War Scroll inside might prove trickier. He’d seen James bringing the large crate in earlier, but he had no idea how big the scroll itself was, or whether it had been filed into an individually locked safety deposit box.

As he listened to the tumblers on the main door click into place, he heard James twitch on the floor. Poor bastard, Dean thought, seems like he’s got enough problems as it is. This ain’t gonnahelp. Not that Dean knew what James’s problem was, since he hadn’t been particularly chatty during their marathon drinking session.

After a few minutes, the heavy door swung open. All of Dean’s fears about finding the scroll were immediately relieved, as the center of the vault was filled with several large jars. They looked to be thousands of years old, and each was capped with a lid inscribed with symbols. Dean moved quickly toward them. He lifted the lid off the nearest jar, to find, to his surprise, a shape was carved onto the inside of the lid—a rudimentary Devil’s Trap. The holy symbol that could contain a demon.

Before Dean could react, a throaty growl sounded behind him.

James McMannon stood outside the vault, totally sober, his eyes jet black. While Dean took a heartbeat to consider how totally screwed he was, James charged.