face. Dean forced himself to keep his eyes closed. “I need you awake!”
From the pocket of his parka, Jason pulled out a length of rope. He pushed Dean over on his stomach. His face hit the dirty floor, and he felt the sharpness of a ski binding under his cheekbone. His face flushed with anger at the helplessness of his situation. Was Jason about to feed on him?
But instead of ripping Dean’s jacket open, Jason wrenched his arms behind his back. He bound his wrists, then his ankles, finishing by hog-tying them to each other.
“Wake up, you son of a bitch. I have a question for you.” Jason brutally kicked Dean in the side for emphasis. Then he stormed out of the room, clawed feet clicking on the floor.
Dean tried to see Grace, but too much debris covered the floor for him to get a line of sight on her. He couldn’t see the air vent, either.
Dean took being tied up as a good sign, though. Maybe Jason was going to let the paralysis wear off so Dean could talk. If so, the second it did, hog-tied or not, Dean was going to do everything he could to destroy Jason. If he had to, he’d hack off all Jason’s limbs with his Bowie knife. It would take the son of a bitch a while to recover from that.
Dean lay waiting for the feeling to return to his body.
FIFTY-NINE
Huddled around the tiny fire, Bobby finally felt his bones thawing out. He watched the snow curl upward into the grey sky. He’d never been in a winter storm this bad. Their progress was too slow. They would have reached the resort by now if the snow weren’t so deep.
Sam shivered across from him, sitting with his arms crossed. He stared into the fire, eyes troubled, brow creased. Bobby could guess what terrible visions Sam conjured in that blaze. Hell.
“Sam.” He looked up at Bobby, his gaze haunted. “You’re not there anymore.”
Sam exhaled. “I know. I think I know, anyway.” He pressed his thumb into the palm of his scarred hand.
Bobby worried about him. The more time they spent out here, the more consumed and withdrawn Sam had become. Maybe it was all the quiet that did it to him, but his thoughts seemed to take him over.
After a couple of hours of warmth, the crackling died down. Bobby felt thoroughly thawed out and crawled into his sleeping bag in his tent.
Sam did the same, and a few minutes later, as Bobby zipped up his tent-fly, he asked, “Do you think it’s weird that we haven’t run across Dean’s trail, or that that thing hasn’t attacked us?”
Bobby stared at him over the dying fire. “This storm’s the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s all but wiped out any trail of Dean. Could be the aswang’s trapped in it, too. It may be tougher than hell, but that don’t make it immune to the weather.”
Sam frowned, obviously not satisfied. “I guess so,” he said. “Goodnight.”
Bobby heard Sam close his tent-fly.
Bobby had wondered why the aswang hadn’t attacked, too. Though he wouldn’t admit as much to Sam. They were exposed prime meat and exhausted in the storm, after all. It was possible the aswang didn’t even know they were out there.
Bobby couldn’t sleep. His wrist was giving him fits. He held it outside the tent for a few minutes, letting it cool in the snow, but ultimately he preferred the warmth of the bag. Eventually, he hunkered down inside his sleeping bag’s fleecy depths and pulled out the folder Marta had given him. He’d been carrying it around since they set off, but this was the first moment he’d had to look at it.
Switching on his headlamp, he opened the manila file. Dozens of articles spilled out. Marta had certainly done a lot of ground work. Some pages were photocopies of the diary of the eighteenth-century Spanish missionary, others were copies of old newspaper articles going back to the 1800s.
He flipped through the pages of the old diary, reading account after account of aswangs creeping into villages at night and sucking fetuses out of pregnant women, and kidneys and livers out of men and children. One family’s son had gone missing while out fishing one day. For ten days they searched for him with no luck. Then one day he just wandered back into the village and lay down on his bed. They couldn’t get him to eat or drink anything, and he just thrashed around