Supernatural--Cold Fire (17 page)

“Is that when you called 911?” Castiel asked.

“No,” Jesse said grimly. “I came down to check, to see if he had car trouble or a problem with the door. I didn’t know… how could I ever imagine? This is a good neighborhood. Something like this…”

“You found the body?” Dean asked.

“Yes,” Jesse said. “But not at first. I saw the car, parked and empty. But then I saw the stains… the blood stains on the door and I walked around to the front of his car and he was… he was… like he was sitting there but… I must have gone into shock. I thought I would scream, but I was gagging, choking on bile, burning my throat…”

“Through all of this, you never heard or saw the attacker?” Dean asked.

“Nothing,” Jesse said. “Just that second slam… and the garage door hasn’t opened since then. He… whoever did this must have crept through the house after… left through the front door or a window. The first police officers checked the entire house. No sign of forced entry, they said. But someone came into our home. Someone did this.” He shuddered. “Seeing him—seeing Brandon… after was horrible enough. Thank God I came down alone.”

“Who would’ve come down with you?” Sam asked.

“Olivia, of course,” Jesse said, as if his answer should have been obvious. “But in her condition, she only takes the stairs when absolutely necessary. That’s why I was alone.”

Confused as Sam, Dean looked at Castiel and asked, “Olivia?”

As if on cue, a woman’s strained voice called down the stairs, “Jesse, I’m all packed. We can go now.”

Jesse looked at them. “She can’t possibly stay here tonight,” he said. “I couldn’t do that to her.” He pressed the folded blanket to his chest. “Don’t think I can stay here tonight either. Every time I close my eyes, I see him out there. One minute we were joking around and the next he’s just… gone. I have no idea what to do now. All our plans… Without Brandon, nothing makes sense anymore. The baby will be here any day. I’ll be a single parent. And a widower. He’ll never see… God, what do I do now…?”

Sam had a sense the question was more than rhetorical. The man seemed at a loss, buffeted by a whirlwind of consuming and dark emotions. “It’s overwhelming now,” Sam acknowledged. “Stay focused on short-term decisions. Call a friend where you can crash for the night or pick a hotel. Get through tonight. And then find a way to get through tomorrow morning.”

A uniformed policewoman came down the stairs carrying a soft suitcase with an extendable handle and wheels a few steps ahead of a very pregnant woman wearing threadbare denim overalls with black hair tucked under a scarf. Her face was red, her eyes puffy from crying.

Castiel nodded toward her. “Olivia Krum,” he said. “The surrogate mother.”

Less than ten minutes had passed since Gary Atherton dimmed the lights in spacious birthing room 3C of Lovering Maternity Center and settled into the padded, reclining lounger reserved for new fathers. In the bed next to him, his exhausted wife slept, propped up at a thirty-degree angle with their newborn son asleep on her chest. The only other source of illumination came from the hallway through the doorway, open a few inches to give the new family some quiet privacy to regroup after a tiring day. Deeper in the room, by the bed and lounger, warm shadows ruled, and the ambient sounds of the round-the-clock hospital staff transformed into a soothing white noise.

Head turned toward his wife and son in a state of pleasant exhaustion, Gary had smiled in the moments before he too fell asleep. As new parents, he and his wife had already been given advice about catching sleep whenever the opportunity presented itself, that the demands of a hungry, soiled or lonely baby would preclude the previously taken for granted restful nights filled with extended hours of uninterrupted sleep. In a few hours at best, young Gabriel Atherton would rouse his mother and father with a tremulous cry, a parental call of duty, but for now all three slept soundly.

Beyond the intermediate shadows of the mother’s bed and the father’s chair, in the farthest corner of the room, by the closet where Gary had stashed an emergency duffel bag filled with clothing and reading material and other supplies, a dark figure waited, inhumanly still.

Straggly black hair obscured her pale face as she stood in the corner, head slightly bowed, clawed hands resting atop her protruding midsection. When the father’s breathing deepened, she moved forward in a silent gliding motion and slipped between the large padded chair and the hospital bed. But her urge to savage the man remained suppressed, overruled by a deeper need. Instead of sinking her claws into his abdomen, she leaned over the hospital bed, letting her matted hair fall away from the back of her neck to reveal a pulsing, slimy hole at the nape.

The strange orifice puckered and swelled, extruding a slender, quivering tentacle. Unerringly, it snaked its way across the bed covers and over the mother’s chest. Nearing its target, the tip of the thin tentacle flexed outward to reveal a ring of tiny lamprey-like teeth coated in a clear viscous fluid. A moment later, they clamped onto the infant’s neck, establishing a gentle seal. After the clear fluid numbed the delicate skin, the narrow teeth sunk further into the newborn’s flesh. Then the tentacle pulsed, contracting to suck, feeding…

Knuckles rapped on the heavy wooden door.

Lulled by the feeding cycle, the dark figure took a moment to react to the interruption. Then her head swiveled toward the door as the shaft of light from the hallway widened, banishing shadows across the room.

“Excuse me, folks,” the young nurse said as she took a step into the room. “Wondered if I could get you—?”

The question forgotten, the nurse stared back at her, also momentarily frozen as her mind attempted to make sense out of something from a waking nightmare. Failing, the nurse screamed, her hand sweeping against the wall as she frantically tried to flip the light switch.

In that confused moment, the dark figure stopped feeding. The tentacle retracted into the neck orifice much quicker than it had appeared. If the intruder had glided forward before the feeding, she now rushed backward, faster than human legs and feet would allow, instinctively returning to the darkest corner of the room.

When the nurse found the switch and flicked on the overhead lights, the intruder was gone, the far corner no longer dark, but empty.

* * *

Nurse Maggie O’Brien stood in the doorway with her hand clamped over her mouth. She barely trusted herself not to scream again. If anything had stood in the corner, revealed by the light, she would have screamed. Of that she was certain.

The sound, however, had been more than sufficient to wake the entire Atherton family, mother, father and child.

Gary had startled awake, as if he’d been jolted by a powerful electrical charge, back arched, feet instinctively dropping to the floor to prepare himself for an emergency. But Denise had merely flinched, her entire body tensing as her arms wrapped protectively around her child. Following the nurse’s example, Baby Gabriel had decided screaming was a splendid idea and wailed with all the power in his newborn lungs.

Mothering instincts kicking in, Denise attempted to soothe Gabriel, hugging and rocking him while whispering soothing words into his ear.

“What the hell happened?” Gary asked, eyes wide as he shook his head to shake off the last traces of lethargy.

Maggie imagined the incident from his point of view: He’d heard their nurse scream at the top of her lungs and yet nothing seemed amiss. But she had yet to recover from the effects of the nighttime shock and couldn’t begin to explain what she saw. With one hand pressed to her chest and the rapid pounding of her heart, Maggie tried to slow and deepen her shallow breathing. She pointed to the back of the room with her other, trembling, hand. “Did you—? I saw—I don’t know what—! It was—was horrible.”

Gary looked over his shoulder, but obviously nothing was there for him to see anymore, and returned his questioning gaze to her with a confused shrug. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s gone now,” she said. “But there was something by the bed, standing over Denise and the baby.” She spoke slowly in an attempt to frame her overwrought words in a way that might preserve her reputation as a sane and rational maternity ward nurse while explaining the reason for her frightened outburst. But how could she explain the strange shape that looked like a woman but wasn’t a woman—or human for that matter—or the snakelike appendage sticking out of her neck?

Having heard the commotion, Nancy Dougherty and Janice Aquino, the two other nurses from her station, arrived and posed the same questions the Athertons were asking. Questions that had no easy answers. “Somebody was in the room,” Maggie explained over and over again. “When I looked in, I saw… someone standing there.”

“It’s past visiting hours,” Nancy Dougherty reminded her. “If it wasn’t one of us, who could it have been?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie said, afraid to cross the threshold of the room. What if she—it—came back for her, the only witness. “She was standing by the bed. But she heard me call out and before I could turn on the lights, she… retreated to the corner.”

She remembered the freaky way the intruder had moved backward, not as if she took the required number of steps to walk from bed to corner, but almost as if she had willed her body to glide across the floor.

“A woman?” Gary asked.

“Think so,” Maggie said. “But I’m not—I can’t be sure. It was dark…”

Because she wouldn’t commit to the truth, she realized how lame her explanation sounded. She wanted to tell them she couldn’t be sure what she saw was human. In fact, she was almost certain whatever had been in the room was not human. But how could she admit that aloud to patients and colleagues?

With all the uncertainty hanging over them, Nancy Dougherty decided to search the room. She opened the door to a small supply closet—obviously much too small and confined to conceal a full grown woman—before crossing the room to look in the patient closet, where she revealed Gary’s coat and duffel bag but nothing sinister. She faced Maggie, spread her arms and shrugged. A birthing room offered precious few hiding places for an intruder.

Finally, Nancy dropped to one knee and peered under the adjustable bed, which made Maggie feel like a small child frightened of her dark bedroom. Oblivious to the damage she continued to wreak on Maggie’s self-esteem, Nancy said cheerily, “All clear!”

Maggie had to acknowledge this wasn’t about her or her bruised ego. The lighthearted search was meant to calm and reassure the agitated patients, something Maggie herself was incapable of accomplishing in her present state. For that at least, she was grateful for Nancy’s presence.

Janice took Maggie’s hands. “You said the lights were out,” she reminded Maggie. “I’m sure it was just a trick of light and shadows.”

“Sure—you’re right. You must be right,” Maggie said, unconvinced but unwilling to jeopardize her reputation any further by insisting on an impossible explanation.

She fully expected the Athertons to lodge a complaint about her behavior as it was, without compounding the damage. But Nancy and Janice had certainly helped to smooth things over. Gabriel was quiet, his breathing punctuated by faint, hitching sobs as he drifted off to sleep again.

After the other nurses left the room, Maggie addressed the Athertons. “I’m so sorry. For startling you, for waking the baby. I’m near the end of a double shift and I must be more tired than I knew. I’m sure Nurse Aquino was right. Trick of the shadows.”

Gary and Denise nodded as she backed out of the room, seemingly more concerned with getting Gabriel back to sleep than dwelling on what had awoken him in the first place. That was the best outcome she could hope for at the moment, a return to normalcy. Come morning, she might face consequences for her involuntary reaction. But she couldn’t help what she saw—or thought she saw.

Mortified, she stood outside birthing room 3C and leaned against the wall for support. Her legs felt like limp noodles and her hands still trembled when she held them out. Though she had begun to doubt her own eyes, the fear she’d experienced in those brief, horrifying moments still coursed through her veins.

She had barely managed to calm herself when Dr. Hartwell showed up outside the Athertons’ room, a look of professional concern on her face.

“Hi, Maggie,” Dr. Hartwell said. “How are you?”

“Okay,” she said unconvincingly. She attempted a smile and wondered if it looked as ghastly as it felt. “Hard to tell around here sometimes, right?”

Dr. Hartwell nodded. “I’ve been hearing some… odd stories about you and the Athertons from the other nurses.”

“Not the Athertons,” Maggie admitted. “All me.”

“Everything under control?”

“Now?” Maggie asked. “I think so. Hope so, anyway.”

“What happened—exactly?”

“I, um, startled the Athertons.”

“Screamed, is what I heard.”

“I would say that’s accurate,” Maggie said, mortified all over again. “The Athertons were sleeping. Baby too. So I managed to wake them up—suddenly.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Oh, that’s probably not a good idea. All things considered.”