Witch's Canyon Read Free Page A

It’s all on Main, and Main isn’t that long.”
    “There really is a Main Street?” Sam asked.
    “You bet. And Grand Avenue too. It’s paved for three blocks, then dirt.”
    “And this place isn’t paradise on Earth for you?
    I’m shocked.”
    “Like I said, I’m a city girl. It was fi ne when I had Ross—he loved it all so much, I enjoyed just seeing it through his eyes. But when you have to drive into Flagstaff for a decent half-caf mochaccino or a conversation that doesn’t begin and end with the weather . . .” She sighed. “It gets a little old.”
    “I bet,” Dean said. “We’ll get out of your hair, Juliet. Thanks for the warning about the giant cockroaches.”
    “Thank you for checking on me,” she said. “If you’re in town long, maybe I’ll see you at the Wagon Wheel.”
    “The Wagon Wheel?” Sam echoed.
    “You’ll see it.”

    * * *
    14 SUPERNATURAL
    “She was nice,” Sam said when they reached the black Impala and were safely out of her range of hearing.
    “She was hot.”
    “Sure, I guess.”
    “Don’t tell me you didn’t see it.”
    “More your type than mine, I guess.”
    “She was hot,” Dean reiterated. “Trust me.”
    “So it’s good that we investigated.”
    “Took a few minutes away from our real business,” Dean said. “But I’m okay with that.” Sam hoped those few minutes hadn’t cost anyone’s life. They were going to Cedar Wells to look into a periodic killing spree that Marina McBain, a police detective in New York, had told them about. According to the article she gave them, every forty years the area became the scene of a rash of unexplained deaths. Twenty-nine killings, the last time. And the town had grown since then, the whole region becoming far more populous as the state of Arizona boomed.
    According to their best calculations, December fifth would be the beginning of the next forty-year cycle. Today was the fourth. If their calculations had been off, and the time they spent at the Grand Canyon had meant death instead of life for anyone, they wouldn’t feel so good about their side trip.
    Sam and Dean Winchester both followed in their father’s footsteps, and their father—since the hor-rifying death of his wife, their mother—had been a hunter.
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    Not of animals, or birds. John Winchester hunted monsters, ghosts, demons—the creatures most people only believed in deep down, in their 3:00 a.m.
    hearts, and that they laughed off when the sun was bright and their spirits high.
    Even then, in the light of day, they talked about spirits.
    They just didn’t really understand what they were talking about.
    Dean shoved the key into the ignition, gave it a crank, and the car’s engine roared to satisfying life.
    Ticking the vehicle into reverse, he glanced at Sam.
    “It is a big hole,” he said. “I was right about that.”
    “You were right, Dean. That canyon is one big freaking hole.”

    TWO
    Ralph McCaig had been born over in Dolan Springs, to a father who had worked at the Tennessee Schuyl-kill Mine and a mother who mostly drank and complained, especially after the old man died in a mining accident and the pension checks never quite made it to the end of the month. Except for a hitch in the army during the Gulf War, in which the closest he had been to action was a street brawl outside a bar in Frankfurt, Germany, he’d always lived in Arizona’s high country, land of canyons and plateaus, evergreen trees, mule deer, and tourists.
    On the back bumper of his Chevy pickup, which had been new before that war but old by the time he bought it in 1998, he had a sticker that said, if it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot ’em? A gun rack over the rear window held a twelve-gauge and a 30.06, and he had actually used the ought-six once to fire at a BMW that whipped around a blind Witch’s
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    curve at eighty or more, startling him so much as he relieved himself beside the road that he’d peed on his