FOURTEEN

Guess I’ll have to find another translator, Sam thought. Something tells me that Walter won’t appreciate having a shotgun stuck in his face. Five minutes into the sale, Walter had only made a single low-ball bid—whether that was due to strategy or limited funds, Sam couldn’t be sure. Of course, Sam didn’t have any money, either.

Of the half-dozen interested parties, only three of them were truly serious about buying the scrolls. Eli Thurman, Sam’s alter ego, Robert Singer, and a Midwestern man who had introduced himself simply as “Gerald.”

Eli had initially offered 100,000 dollars, which everyone knew was too low a price. Gerald quickly countered with 115,000 dollars, which Sam raised by another 10,000 dollars. In the early phase of the sale, Sam concentrated on Shochat, who was moving deliberately around the room, looking out the windows, checking the side rooms, and not-too-subtly fingering the safety on the gun in his pants pocket.

As the bids grew higher, the three less-serious buyers dropped out entirely. Gerald and Eli were the most active in the auction, with Sam chiming in every now and then to keep things interesting. It began to feel like the sale might finish without incident when the sound of a commotion interrupted the proceedings. A large mass thumped against the door, then slid slowly down it.

Sam was the first on his feet, but Shochat pushed him back down to the couch.

“Go, Benjamin,” Mr. Feldman said calmly. Shochat followed the order, heading slowly toward the suite’s entrance, his pistol raised.

Sam quickly realized that his brother could be the cause of the noise. It wasn’t what they had planned, but it might be Dean’s plan B. Sam leaned his weight onto the balls of his feet, ready to spring for the clay jars.

“Who’s there?” Shochat’s voice demanded. He was now out of Sam’s line of sight.

The room was silent as everyone waited for a response, but there was no answer.

Come on, Dean, don’t get yourself shot.

On cue, Sam heard the door swing open. Two heartbeats later, a gunshot rang out, sending Sam leaping to his feet.

“Stop!” Mr. Feldman cried, putting himself between Sam and the jars.

Sam had enough inertia to plow the older man through the window, but he wasn’t going for the jars. He was going for the entrance lounge, where hopefully Dean wasn’t lying dead on the floor. His haste caused him to crash directly into Shochat, as he stumbled back into the room, clutching his bloody hand.

“Dean?” Sam called out, pushing Shochat aside.

“‘Fraid not, sweetie,” a melodious voice replied. A young woman charged into the room, a black pistol in her hand. She was beautiful, and vaguely familiar. That must be the girl, Sam realized, Julia.

Across the room, Walter swallowed hard. “Dear, what did I tell you about collateral damage?” he said.

Julia rolled her eyes.

“Keep it to a minimum. I know, Dad.”

Up on the roof, Dean was experiencing full-blown panic. There was no way he’d be able to go through with the plan. Rappelling down the side of a skyscraper strapped to a leather harness is not a friggin’ option. Sam is just going to have to say “yes” to Satan and fight the good fight.

“You’ve gotta calm yourself down, buddy,” the window washer said encouragingly. “You get nerves on this job, you’re gonna end up schmeared on a taxi like cream cheese.”

“What’s your name again?” Dean asked.

“Marco,” the man replied.

“Listen Marco, I need you to shut the hell up for a second.”

In all of their years hunting, Dean had never been this crippled by fear. Well, except for the ghost sickness, he remembered, but that wasn’t my fault.

Sam is down there, counting on you. Man the hell up.

“Okay,” Dean said, mustering all of his courage. “This is gonna come as a shock, but I’m new at this.”

“You don’t say,” Marco replied, raising an eyebrow.

“So if you could lose the d-bag attitude for a second and help me get this harness on—”

“D-bag? Like a duffel?”

“It’s something your kids are gonna call you behind your back,” Dean said under his breath, picking up the extra leather harness.

“What’s in your d-bag, by the way?”

“Excuse me?”

Marco pointed at Dean’s weapon-filled duffel bag, which was still slung over his shoulder.

“Lunch.”

“Better eat it now. Leave it up here and it’ll be gone as soon as one of these guys comes up to piss.”

“Guess I’ll have to take it with me then,” Dean said.

With Marco’s help, he was soon strapped in and standing at the building’s precipice. Five other window washers were already suspended from the roof, working twenty flights above the roar of traffic below. The flood of taxis on 50^th Street looked the size of Hot Wheels, which didn’t help Dean’s vertigo in the slightest.

Dangling one foot over the ledge, he tried to count the floors down to the Presidential Suite. Thirty-fifth floor, he told himself. Twelve floors straight down. I can do this. Sam wouldn’t even think twice, and he’s a salad-eating nancy. With one last tug on the strap, he began to lower himself down the building’s façade.

“Hey, you forgetting something?” Marco called. In his outstretched hand he held a leather belt fitted with spray bottles and a squeegee. “Gotta say, Tony, even for a beginner, you suck at this.”

Taking the tool belt, Dean began his descent.

Walter and Julia weren’t wasting any time. They’d corralled Mr. Feldman, Shochat and the prospective buyers in a corner of the Presidential Suite, all of their faces wet with tears from the pepper spray Julia had used on the guards outside. No one had been killed, which was a relief, but Sam knew that could change in an instant if someone didn’t cooperate.

Blood from Shochat’s gunshot wound dripped onto Sam’s shoes. With Julia and Walter distracted by their examination of the clay jars, Sam pulled down one of the ornate curtains and ripped it into long strips, giving them to Benjamin to wrap around his hand.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Julia yelled.

“Keeping him from bleeding to death,” Sam replied angrily.

Before Julia could react, Walter interceded.

“It’s okay, Jules. We don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

Julia scoffed. She was clearly bad cop to Walter’s good cop.

“It’s too late for that,” Mr. Feldman said mournfully. His eyes weren’t on his assistant, but rather on the tallest jar, which Walter was carefully wrenching open. Sam noticed that he had dispensed with his sling.

“You think we want to do this?” Julia spat at Feldman. “This is for your own damn good.”

Sam caught a glimpse of the Devil’s Trap inscribed on the top of the lid as Walter set it back on the table.

“You don’t want to be opening that here, Walter,” he said.

“I know what I’m doing, Sam.”

“Sam?” Shochat questioned, looking puzzled. “I thought your name was Robert?”

“It’s Sam to my friends,” he said, with a hard look at Walter. “And people I thought were my friends.”

Walter looked away. Reaching into the open jar, he grasped at the contents. Sam flinched, the millennia-old scrolls would be impossibly delicate.

“Walter...” Sam said, again trying to warn him. But before he could continue Julia thrust her gun into his face.

“You want to let him concentrate,” she said through gritted teeth. “If this goes wrong, people are going to get thrown out the window.”

You have no idea, Sam thought.

Walter pulled a petrified-looking black object out of the jar with some difficulty. It clearly wasn’t a scroll, but rather some sort of stopper—an additional moisture barrier put in place to protect the fragile parchment, Sam guessed. Walter studied it closely, then set it aside, once more reaching into the jar. This time, his eyes lit up like a kid at Christmas. He must have struck parchment, Sam figured.

Outside the suite, something scraped heavily against the door.

“What was that?” Julia demanded.

“You tell me,” her father replied without looking up from his work. “You were supposed to handle them.” As he lifted the first scroll out of the jar, his joyous look faded. “Not the right one,” he muttered.

“Keep looking. I’ve got this,” Julia said, moving toward the door.

Sam took the opportunity to step out of the corner and over to Walter.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said softly. “You want to read the scrolls, wait for them to show up in a museum.”

“That’s not how it works, Sam,” the man replied. “The document I’m looking for is never going to be in a museum. If the wrong people get their hands on it...” He looked pointedly at red-headed Eli. “Well, that would be bad.”

Sam began to wonder exactly what Walter’s endgame was. Would he disappear with the scroll, abandoning his life in New York?

Julia returned from the door, pistol again trained on Sam and the others.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “One of the guards twitching in his sleep. Now let’s get out of here.”

“This is it,” Walter said, hefting a second piece of parchment.

The War Scroll.

That’s not good, Sam thought. They’re after the same page that we are. Chances are, they’re not going to just hand it over once they hear our story.

James McMannon woke with a start. His head was ringing, his body was slumped against an overturned desk and his eyes were seared by pepper spray. Where am I? he wondered, before recognizing the slightly blurred but distinct carpeting of the Waldorf Astoria underneath him.

Memories flooded back all at once; the girl pistol-whipping him, his nephew, the strange fixation he’d had with that smell... That smell... It suddenly filled his nostrils, and everything else faded away. He had to get to that smell. Someone was trying to take it away from him, and that must not be allowed.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sam yelled, getting dangerously close to the barrel of Julia’s handgun.

“Back up, or I swear to God I’ll put a hole in your face,” she shouted back.

Walter took the scroll and put it into his metal briefcase. In his haste to get it squared away, he fumbled the large clay jar, sending it crashing to the floor. As it shattered, everyone instinctively took a step back. Priceless history was buried in the mess of clay fragments, and no one wanted to be the one to step on it.

A look of immense regret washed over Walter’s face, then was replaced by abject horror. For an instant, an impossibly bright light spilled out of the jar’s broken remains.

That can’t be good, Sam thought.

As the sound of the crash subsided, it was replaced by a furious scraping from the entrance lounge. As before, it set the whole room on edge. This time, however, the tumult didn’t subside after a few seconds. Instead, it got louder and louder and was punctuated by the sound of something heavy hitting wood, as if an increasingly agitated animal was outside and wanted in. Like a dog, Sam thought. Perfect.

“Jules?” Walter said.

She raised her pistol to cover the entrance.

“Nothing out there we can’t handle,” she said confidently.

This would be a good time to interrupt, Dean.

With Julia’s attention on the entrance lounge, Sam crouched and began to pick through the clay shards. As he flipped one over in his hands, he found a rough pattern engraved on what must have been the jar’s interior surface. A sigil, he realized. Angelic magic. And now it’s broken. Whatever had been contained by it was now free.

The scraping stopped, the sudden and profound silence perhaps even more disturbing than the grating noise of claws on wood. Sam’s foot brushed away clay fragments, freeing a path between him and the entrance. Before he could move, Eli’s hand gripped his shoulder. The man’s eyes were as wide as saucers, betraying his desperation. He didn’t want Sam to leave them.

Then the world seemed to fracture. Wind exploded into the room, swirling the curtains and kicking up dust from the splintered jar. A cluster of glass slivers blew past Sam’s head, others lodged painfully in his back and neck. Knocked forward by the blast, it was impossible to keep his balance. Sam landed with a thud in the pile of parchment and clay, immediately rolling off to protect what was left of the scrolls.

As he sat up, he saw the oddest sight—Dean, hanging by a thread outside the suite’s now-empty window frame, a rock salt shotgun hefted offensively through the opening. He had come through on his part of the plan, although he was a little behind schedule.

“Sorry ’bout that. Windows are mirrored.” Despite the needling pain from the glass and rock salt, Sam was incredibly grateful his brother had shown up when he had. But the sense of relief was short-lived.

In the entrance lounge, the door pounded off its hinges, catching Julia off-guard and smashing her against the wall. Walter, briefcase in hand, spun and ran back into the main room, but he couldn’t outrun the beast outside, which quickly overtook him. Claws dug into his leg, pulling him backwards.

From the main room, all Sam could see was Walter’s face as he disappeared out the door.

“Little help here?” Dean called out, still hanging outside the window. Sam moved to the hole, but instead of dragging Dean in, he pulled the shotgun out of his brother’s hand and rushed after Walter.

When he reached the entrance lounge, Sam stopped in his tracks. Walter was pinned to the ground not by a Hellhound, but by the ill-kempt security guard, James. His unnaturally long nails were digging like claws into the biblical scholar’s leg, leaving jagged gashes behind.

Sam leveled the shotgun and let loose a rock salt shell. The spread hit James square in the chest, hammering him into the far wall. But before Walter could move, the security guard was back on him, his eyes pitch black. Sam’s finger pulled back on the trigger once more, but nothing happened.

Damn it. Out of shells.

“Help me!” Walter cried as James took another swipe at him, gouging at his face. The demon then used his grip to lift Walter and slam him into the nearby sofa. Blood splattered across the cream wallpaper and a portrait of Harry Truman that hung nearby.

James then dived at the metal briefcase that had been hidden under Walter’s body. As he scratched at the lock, Julia scrambled up behind him, her pistol raised.

The shot nearly deafened Sam, who was mere feet from the business end of the handgun as it fired. The bullet tore into James’s back, exiting through his right shoulder and leaving a trail of gore across the couch. His limp body slumped over the briefcase, but Sam knew it wouldn’t stay down for long.

It took a lot more than that to kill a demon.

“Hey. Ass-hat.”

Sam turned to see his brother clambering over the jagged glass left in the window frame. Dean lobbed a set of shells toward Sam, who caught them deftly and began loading.

“Drop your weapons!” a voice shouted forcefully from the hallway. Sam looked up to see a brace of rifles pointed at him, a pair of burly police officers holding them. They were addressing both Sam and Julia, who was still holding her pistol as she tended to her father.

Sam was faced with about a dozen choices. Surrender, run, fight, try to talk... but he chose none of them. Instead he froze in place, fearfully eyeing James’s now-stirring body. Julia, on the other hand, spun around immediately and put the policemen in her sights. Like it or not, they were going to assume that Sam was working with her. That left him no option—he had to run.

As the officers opened fire, he dived for cover. Thankfully, their aim was wide, shattering the wood frame of the archway between the lounge and the main room instead of Sam’s head.

“Sam!” Dean yelled, his voice worried. He was struggling to unhook himself from his harness. He had his switchblade out and was sawing roughly at the fraying straps.

The sound of gunfire had pushed the rest of the room’s occupants further into the corner—except one. Shochat cinched the wrappings on his hand tight and moved toward the broken jar at the chamber’s center. Scooping as many of the fragments as he could into his good hand, he deposited them gently in his jacket pocket. Behind him, Eli was squealing helplessly.

Sam heard the sound of Julia’s pistol firing several times, then she stumbled into the main room. Walter’s briefcase was firmly in her grasp as she headed for the window—and Dean.

“Will that hold two?” she demanded.

“What the eff, lady?” Dean snapped back, stepping away from her.

Seconds later, James barreled into the room, his face twisted into a canine snarl.

Behind him, the police officers stared in awe at the mortally wounded man bounding across the room. Their rifles dropped to their sides as James hurled himself into Julia, who in turn fell into Dean. The trio stumbled, off-balance, then toppled out of the open window.